Zagourski

An outstanding photographic reportage from the twenties and thirties brings back the memory of ways of living, ceremonies, adorned bodies of an Africa that can be aptly defined as "lost". This extraordinary, unpublished pictures, taken with great technical skill and with a sense of great dignity of [...]
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An outstanding photographic reportage from the twenties and thirties brings back the memory of ways of living, ceremonies, adorned bodies of an Africa that can be aptly defined as "lost". This extraordinary, unpublished pictures, taken with great technical skill and with a sense of great dignity of the people portrayed, constitute a monument to the African continent as it was.Kazimir Ostoja Zagorski (1880- 1941) was born in Poland. He fled to Congo in 1924 to escape the Communist regime. Zagorski was the first professional photographer to travel throughout the interior of Congo and visiting also the neighboring countries, Rwanda, Burundi, Uganda, Kenya, and South Africa. During his long stay in Africa he took thousands of pictures, 500 of which, divided in two extraordinary series on different tribes, build up to a unique historic and ethnographic survey. In a sense, Zagorski's work constitutes the first "non- European" look, devoid of the colonial overtones that characterize much contemporary work. His forays into the depths of the African continent took him into the most remote villages of the Kuba, Mangbetu, Bwaka, Tutsi, Masai, etc., where he took unprecedented pictures of great ethnographic interest. He documented, for example, ceremonies (initiation, circumcision, excision, masked dances, etc.), the great African creativity in body ornament (from scarification to hair dresses, from jewels to lip plugs), clothes and all utilitarian objects placed in their appropriate cultural context (musical instruments, shields, stools, knives, containers, etc.).