(3 of 3)
No one denies the beauty and power of Fisher and Beckwith's work or downplays the effort involved, but some have suggested that in pursuing pretty pictures they've taken advantage of their subjects. "The criticism," says Monni Adams, an art historian and archaeologist at Harvard's Peabody Museum, "is that they are exploiting these people by showing their nudity and other unusual characteristics." Adams quickly adds that she doesn't believe the criticism is fair. "Their pictures go far beyond the phenomenon of bare-breasted women," she says. "There's a sense of people's activities, their quality of life."
Beyond that, the photographers have gone out of their way to repay indigenous Africans for the access they've been granted. They have, for example, established a Maasai primary school, helped Africans get educated in the West, purchased medicine and even helped dig wells. But it isn't always easy, says Fisher, to decide where helping ends and meddling begins. "It's a real conflict for us," she says. "Should we be exposing these groups to the outside world or should we leave them alone?"
The truth, say scholars, is that it won't make much difference in the end. The pressures on traditional African ceremonies are inexorable. Many ethnologists believe these changes are, in fact, part of the natural life cycle of such rituals. "African traditions are not vanishing," says Mullen Kreamer of the National Museum of Natural History. "They are changing. Even ceremonies that have been performed for hundreds of years have changed throughout the centuries as people adapt to new stimuli and new ideas." Still, there is a poignancy in Beckwith and Fisher's images, a sense that we are seeing some of the last things on earth that have not been subsumed by 20th century Western culture. Jason Clay, co-founder of Cultural Survival Quarterly, uses the phrase salvage ethnography to describe the race to capture these traditions. "It would be tragic," he says, "if work like that of Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher turned out to be their final documentation."
--Reported by Andrea Dorfman/New York