ELIOT ELISOFON 91 FIGS. 20–22: Spreads from The Sculpture of Africa: two Dogon figures, two Fang heads, one Fang figure. Photos by Eliot Elisofon. Eliot Elisofon, William Buller Fagg, The Sculpture of Africa, London: Thames & Hudson, 1958, pp. 32–33, 168–169, 174–175. LIFE magazine, Duchamp Descending a Staircase (fig. 19),18 which stands as a tribute to Duchamp’s avantgarde work. With his multiple exposures of a Gobu throwing knife, Elisofon wrote that it was an “attempt to capture the essence of the object in flight, without its having actually been thrown and seen in flight.”19 He also assures the viewer that there are “no tricks involved in these photographs … and there has not been a single dot or line of retouching.”20 Inspired by the 1935 exhibition African Negro Art at the Museum of Modern Art and building on his experience as MOMA’s first staff photographer, Elisofon embarked on a major project to survey 25,000 works of African art in museums and private collections around the world, including Africa, Europe, and the United States. He photographed more than 2,000 objects, of which over 400 views appeared in 1958 in the large-format book The Sculpture of Africa,21 with text by William Fagg, Deputy Keeper of Ethnology at the British Museum, and an insightful preface on “primitive art” by Ralph Linton, Sterling Professor of Anthropology at Yale University. In this groundbreaking publication, Elisofon and Fagg combined an appreciation of the formal qualities of the objects with anthropological knowledge about their creation, use, and meaning. The use of multiple views, details, and enlargements, along with Fagg’s scholarly text and cultural and linguistic designations, encouraged a new way of seeing and interpreting African sculptural works (figs. 20–22).
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