ART on view 92 FIGS. 23–25: Lost-wax casting, Anna village, Côte d’Ivoire. Photographs by Eliot Elisofon, 1972. Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, EEPA EECL 6947, 6963, 6974. National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution. Art as Process: From Sequence Photography to Motion Picture Film and Television It took a still photographer to see what cinematographers had missed for years. Jacquelyn Judge, editor of Modern Photography Elisofon was passionate about the artistic process when photographing art in situ in Africa. He often focused his camera on artists at work and documented in great detail the production of arts and crafts among diverse African cultures. He frequently commissioned works of art and produced photographic series documenting their production in black-and-white and color film (figs. 23– 25). His interest in sequence photography led to an increased engagement with the moving image. He became involved in Hollywood feature films, first as a color consultant and still photographer, and later as the director and producer of educational documentaries and television series on African arts and cultures. The “Art as Process” section of Africa ReViewed underscores the intrinsic relationships between the photographic archives and the museum’s permanent collection. Elisofon’s images of a Mangbetu woman’s traditional hairstyle—a beautiful halo-shaped basketry frame of woven reeds and braided hair—are an excellent example of his sequence photography and his photographic practices. The elaborate hairstyle accentuates the Mangbetu ideal of beauty, especially the high forehead and elongated skull created by binding the heads of infants. Exotic profiles of the coiffure by European travelers from the 1870s onward (including Queen Elizabeth II) were circulated in postcards, stamps, and film posters and had become an iconic image of Central Africa by the early to mid-twentieth century.22 Guided by an overarching paradigm of salvage ethnography that developed in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (i.e., the notion that “primitive,” or indigenous, cultures were “vanishing” under the onslaught of Western civilization), Elisofon worked hard to capture and preserve on film what he perceived as rapidly disappearing cultural traditions. Even though the Mangbetu no longer practiced the head binding of infants in 1970, he found an elderly woman with an elongated head who still knew the practice of creating the traditional hairstyle. In the mode of a salvage photographer, Elisofon spent two days photographing the demonstration in both black-and-white and color film. A small video monitor in the exhibition presents a slide show of the entire sequence of color images of the elderly woman
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