Yesterday, Sociological Images reposted these incredible images, which originally came from the Daily Mail, a conservative British tabloid. These images appeared in “Femail” - the Daily Mail’s lifestyle section for women - under the title “Out of Africa: The incredible tribal fashion show inspired by Mother Nature.” Both SocImages and another fascinating blog, zunguzungu, took issue with the vapid exoticization that was going on in the article. I highly reccomend reading zunguzungu’s eloquent analysis of the Daily Mail’s presentation of these images, titled “Recycling Africa“.
Serious Business aside, I just want to say this: the images themselves are absolutely striking. When I separate these images from the Daily Mail’s silly writeup (”As they paint each other’s bodies and make bold decisions about their outfits… it seems that the only thing that motivates them is the sheer fun of creating their looks, and showing them off to other members of the tribe”), and from SocImages’ somewhat guilt-tripping Daily Mail smackdown (”What does it mean that people in the U.K. (and the U.S.) are consuming these images? What is the relationship between these images and colonialism? How do such images interact with “development” rhetoric about how Africa is un- or under-developed, developing, or undevelopable?”), on a purely visual level, I’m just absolutely inspired.
It’s amazing, how we can rearrange ourselves.
June 28th, 2008 at 12:56 am
The images are beautiful, but considering that The Daily Mail has a reputation amongst many of us here in the UK as being a nasty right-wing racist little rag, I’m surprised that the text wasn’t worse.
June 28th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Thanks for the kind words!
Regarding the issue of beauty, it’s so hard to separate the question of why the writer or reader of the femail section of the Daily Mail would find these images beautiful (and what that beauty might signify) from the reasons why the people in the images might themselves have chosen to array themselves that way. I wonder whether “beauty” would even be the right word, which is maybe why you used the word “striking”; in any case, it seems hard to deny that the ways those images (and the text) frame their subjects makes it hard to answer that question. Because we only see those costumes being worn in very “posed” and “high fashion” ways, its hard to get a sense for what kinds of attitudes the women themselves might have for what their dress signifies. And of course, we don’t see any men wearing these kinds of costumes, which strikes me as unlikely to be the case in the real world.
June 28th, 2008 at 1:04 pm
zunguzungu, thanks for your comment!
You bring up an interesting point. When I looked at these images before, even though they were in Daily Mail’s “ladies” section, for some reason I always assumed that these were mostly young men in the pictures. I mean, it’s hard to tell, but a lot of them look flat-chested and broad-shouldered enough to definitely be male. Here are the ones I definitely think are dudes:
http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/02_03/africa10DM1902_468×640.jpg
http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/02_03/africa4DM1902_468×347.jpg
http://img.dailymail.co.uk/i/pix/2008/02_03/africa11DM1902_468×671.jpg
I re-read the Daily Mail piece again, and there are no references to gender at all. I think they’re mostly guys and that the article just glossed over this fact.
As far as the images being posed… I did a little bit of research on the book that these images came from (Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa). I found no information about how the photographer put together these shoots, but I did find this interesting comment in the Amazon.com reviews, by Amyas Naegele:
That all may be true… but circling back to our discussion of beauty, I still want to say that no mater what baggage around the images, no matter what context, they’re still completely, undeniably beautiful to me. Whether or not it’s “bad” for me to want to consume these images, buy that book, and thus somehow contribute to the change that’s happening in Africa that Naegele describes - I don’t know. I suppose every region plays it up for the tourists - like, “come to Hawaii! We have dancing girls in hula skirts!” or how, during the occupation of Japan, many prostitutes told soldiers that they were Geisha, which definitely changed the way people understood the concept back in the West.
Yeah, so many groups refashion themselves for the West, but to what extent do Westerners do that same thing for the rest of the world? Hmmm.
June 28th, 2008 at 5:50 pm
That’s funny that I simply assumed them to be female. Easily led by the nose, I am! I guess I haven’t actually looked at the pictures since I wrote the original posting.
June 30th, 2008 at 9:37 am
Having tribes in my ancestry, these have a special place in my heart. They are beautiful shots, thanks much for this.
“As they paint each other’s bodies and make bold decisions about their outfits… it seems that the only thing that motivates them is the sheer fun of creating their looks, and showing them off to other members of the tribe” - yes I do believe we “westerners” do the same in our own way.
Great post.
June 30th, 2008 at 11:57 am
I loathe and mistrust the Daily Wail as much as any fellow left-aligned Englander. However, the pull-out quote highlighted here simply muses (pretty superficially, I’ll admit!) on possible motivations, rather than stating anything as fact. I think I might’ve missed your point a bit Nadya…are you saying it’s a silly quote because there’s likely to be a more serious motivation for this behaviour than “fun”? If that’s the case, then yeah, I can see why it might seem a bit of a vacuous contention.
Personally though, I really love the idea that it might just be for fun. It’s refreshing…and for that, I guess I can blame the years of exposure to well-meaning but pompous BBC documentaries, which somehow dehumanise anyone they point a camera at by positing every aspect of ambiguous or unfamiliar social behaviour as a hard-wired and brutally functional ‘instinct’ of sorts. Meh!
Either way, like you, I find these images utterly stunning and inspiring. Awesome find, thank you. :)
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:07 am
Mark, apologies for the late response to your comment. But basically, you hit it on the head - I think that it’s a vacuous interpretation, and one that, in my opinion, just isn’t written with respect. It seems to say, “look at these simple people and their outlandish decorations, how amusing!” SocImages kind of captures my problem with the language:
And commenter Nizam on the SocImages post chimes in:
It’s silly, it’s not well-written… it makes me feel bad that we’re still framing these kinds of images in the Western press this way. I know it’s the Daily Mail and we shouldn’t expect much but even they could’ve tried harder to come up with a perspective, y’know?