PhotoBooks Congo (Zaire)

From the author: This is an intimate visual portrait of the Efe pygmies and the Ituri rain forest when they live. From 1990 until the current war in Congo (Zaire) made it impossible, I periodically lived among a small Efe hunter-gatherer clan. Two young Efe hunters, Bezangu and Kaluli befriended me and became my constant companions. Through their eyes, and our adventures together in the forest, I discovered a world unlike any I had known--nightly throbbing of drums, painted bodies dancing by fires, and the sound of harp music drifting through the giant trees. Over the years I unobtrusively photographed their culture and personalities, documenting the vanishing arts of bark cloth making, face and body painting, and hunting with bow and arrow. I saw their laughing children--Dume, Njala, and Dudoko--grow into serious archers, and witnessed their inititation into adulthood in a secretive forest school. There was something almost magical about the Efe--the smallest people on earth surviving in a vast, nearly unknown rain forest; and yet here was the same joy, love and sorrow that we all share. I did not set out to do photography or to write a book, and there was no purpose in my effort other than to fulfill a childhood fascination with the African rain forest. It was only after going to the Ituri forest on my own in 1984 that I discovered the pygmies and realized that as born naturalist they were the perfect guides to my rain forest experience. Of course, in the end,it was the Efe themselves that slyly captured my heart.

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