Human vanity in the Omo and Borås...

Claes Britton | Feb 17, 2009 | 0 comments

And so it is now inaugrated at last, and shown in public for the very first time, our dear friend and longtime collaborator Nicho Södling's great exhibition Vanity of Man. We were a small but rock solid crew of first rate homo sapiens who had endeavoured the journey down from the Royal Capital for last Saturday's grand opening at the Abecita Coresettfabirik Art Museum i Borås in southwest Sweden.

It's a tribute to this museum, and to that entire textile town, that they became the first in Sweden, and in the World, to show this unique material. I've been engaged in the project ever since 2003, when Nicho conducted his first photographic expedition in the Omo river delta in southwest Ethiopia. Ever since, Nicho, with the help and support from Yours Truly, among others, has been trying hard to interest various instititions and publishers in the exhibition, and in a book with his images, all in vain until now. A number of ignorant, unsensitive representatives have routinely dismissed his work as "Africa pictures" of a kind that they've "seen" before, even though Nicho's "fashion portraits" of these tribespeople are better and more powerful than even Irving Penn's and Leni Riefenstahl's "similar" images. It's a comfort that some of our leading Swedish senior master photographers, the likes of Hasse Persson, Håkan Ludwigsson and Hans Hammarskiöld, have recognized the superior quality of Nicho's work and strongly endorsed the project. All three were present at well crowded opening, where Hammarskiöld simultaneously inaugrated his exhibition Barnasinne (Child Spirit), and they were all as taken by the rare power, nerve and personal presence of these prints as everone else in the audience.

Later this spring, the exhibition will visit Stockholm in a smaller fomat. We hope that the ice is now broken and that it will then be able to continue its voyage through Sweden and the world. Also, we're sternly committed to publishing a fantastic book with the images.

Morevover, at the Friday night dinner, I made a binding promise to accompany Nicho on his third expedition to the Omo delta, to gather material for the text for the book.

Besides the unique quality of the images, more than enough in itself, yet another reason for my engagement in this venture is the fact that I myself have already once visited this remote, previously isolated area near the Sudanese border, back in 1988, on a most exclusive and highly adventurous river expedition on the Omo together with my father, under the leadership of the legendary American wildlife guide Conrad Hirsh, who tragically passed away from brain tumor in 1999. The first ten days of the journey took us through a river valley which is completely unpopulated due to the massive amounts of tse-tse flies — huge, nasty beasts who chewed proper chunks of flesh from out of you — but all the more rich with wildlife, hippos and crocodiles above all. At most, we saw more than 300 hippos in one single day. They were interesting but quite intimidating acquaintances, as they constantly threatened to flip our rubber rafts over, to the benifit of the countless crocs, a kind among the largest in the world, no less. On several occasions we had to fire our flare guns to back them off. One and a half of our four rafts burned up one morning which might well have become fatal. We negotiated with great difficulty and hazard a couple of mighty rapids and encountered a number of other obstacles, without safety devices such as satellite phones or other means of communication, so there was certainly no lack of excitement. Then on the last week of the journey, when the great river flattened out and lost its force, branching out in its delta, we motored slowly between the various villages, one more screamingly destitute than the other, with misery stone age style, visting these tribes whose contact with the outside world had then been even more minimal than today, more than twenty years later, when a road has been built, and several renowned documentary films have been shot here.

Of course I can't deny you a few photos from our trip that time.

PS. This Friday, by coincidence, it's finally time to head down to that dear and distant Ethiopia once again, for the first time in at least a decade. I promise to be back with word. DS.

Comments

blog comments powered by Disqus

Human vanity in the Omo and Borås...

Comments

Recent blog entries