An elderly Hamar woman with cane at the weekly market in Turmi, a small multi-ethnic frontier town in the remote Southern Nations, Nationalities and Peoples Region of Ethiopia, East Africa. Adorned with seeded necklaces, brass bracelets, and goatskin clothing.
The Hamar are semi-nomadic herders and farmers who live in small settlements or hamlets scattered across the hills, plains, wooded riverines, and dry thorny bush terrain in Ethiopia's lower Omo Valley, near the border with northern Kenya and South Sudan. explore#133
© National Geographic Yourshot (Editor's Favourite, August 2018). Story and assignment: “Rethinking Portraiture.”
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Balinese duck tender with traditional wide-brim rain hat under an early monsoon drizzle - returning from the paddy fields along a path through the original Monkey Forest near Padang Tegal Village, Ubud, Bali.
Digital slide scan, shot with an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic (SMC Pentax Zoom 45~125mm f/4) - before modernization and the onslaught of mass tourism that now compromise much of Ubud's original charm, circa 1972. expl#32
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© National Geographic Yourshot (Editors’ Favourite with Editors’ Note, May 2018). Story and assignment: “While on a Walk.”
The decisive moment. I looked up to the towering coconut palms swaying overhead during an afternoon stroll near Balapitiya, a small fishing village on the southern coast of Sri Lanka's Low Country. To my delight, I saw a Sinhalese toddy tapper walking quickly for balance on tight coir ropes that ran from treetop to treetop at 30 to 40 feet above ground - all part of an elaborate process for harvesting the sweet milky sap of cut coconut blossoms. A serendipitous moment in the renowned land of Serendip.
The sap is ultimately fermented into “toddy” or palm wine and distilled into arrack - a stronger, more refined, and highly popular alcoholic beverage. The ropes are made of strong coir or coconut fiber. Portable equipment carried on these aerial circuits includes two types of knives in a wooden case to slice the spadix, a small wooden mallet or piece of bone to tap the sides of the spathe, a coconut shell containing green leaf paste to control the oozing sap, and a clay pot or gourd to collect the sap.
Toddy tapping is done by men from several castes in the region. An individual tapper can harvest a hundred trees or more in a day as individual treetop circuits are routinely completed. As far as I can tell, this dangerous high-ropewalk harvesting method is solely unique to Sri Lanka. It faces extinction today.
Noritsu Koki QSS-31 digital film scan, shot with an Asahi Pentax Spotmatic (SMC Pentax Zoom 45~125mm f/4), circa 1984. expl#80
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© National Geographic Yourshot (Editors' Favourite, May 2018). Story and assignment: “While on a Walk”
A Dogon woman with calabash carrying bowls makes her way across the rugged crest of the Bandiagara escarpment in central Mali, West Africa.
She is on a long weekly trek to market that begins in one of the small adobe villages nestled among giant boulders at the base of the sandstone escarpment. Ancient walking trails that connect the villages in the sandy semi-desert plains below ultimately converge at a steep and stony staircase on the cliff’s sheer face leading to the market on the escarpment plateau.
The Bandiagara escarpment and its rocky scree has transformed over the centuries into a vast cultural landscape consisting of huge sandstone rock slabs riddled with holes, faults, burial caves, rock shelters and secluded adobe villages embedded in cavities high on the steep cliffside. Noritsu Koki QSS-31 digital film scan, Asahi Pentax Spotmatic (SMC Pentax Zoom 45~125mm f/4), circa 1976. expl#28
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"To possess the world in the form of images is, precisely, to re-experience the unreality and remoteness of the the real." Susan Sontag, On Photography
Adorned with a wild boar's tusk, facial chalk markings, decorated goat-skin clothing and an ornamental clay lip-plate. Shot at a communal dance in a Mursi semi-nomadic pastoral settlement on the bank of the Mago River, a tributary that joins the essential Omo River in a remote corner of southwestern Ethiopia.
On the meaning of lip-plates in Mursi culture and society
The Mursi are one of the last groups in Africa where women still wear large wooden or clay plates in their lower lips. Most Mursi women wear lip-plates as an aesthetic symbol of cultural pride and identity, signifying passage to womanhood/adulthood. They are more frequently worn by unmarried or newly wed women and are generally worn when serving men food or during important ritual events (weddings, men's duelling competitions, communal dances, safari photo-ops).
Debunking popular myths
Contrary to popular opinion among travellers and other passing strangers, ethnographers found little or no connection between the size of a woman’s lip-plate and the size of her bridewealth (cattle, guns).
Anthropologists and ethnographers have debunked another popular myth surrounding the lip-plate in this region. They found no evidence that the labret originated as a deliberate attempt to disfigure and make women less attractive to slave traders, yet this myth seems to surface regularly in accounts by professional and amateur photographers, tourists, and bloggers alike.
The Mursi and Mursiland
The Mursi are semi-nomadic farmers and herders who depend on shifting hoe-cultivation (mostly drought-resistant varieties of sorghum) and cattle herding for their livelihood. They number less than ten thousand today.
Most Mursi live in small settlements dispersed across Mursiland, a remote territory of about thirty by eighty kilometres between the Omo and Mago Rivers in southwestern Ethiopia, near the border with South Sudan and northern Kenya.
The terrain varies from a volcanic plain dominated by a range of hills and a major watershed to a riverine forest, wooded grasslands and thorny bushland thickets. The climate is harsh and unstable with low rainfall and daily temperatures regularly exceeding 40°C in the shade during the dry season.
Cogent ethnographic accounts on the meaning of lip-plates in Mursi culture and society include:
• David Turton, "Lip plates and the people who take photographs: uneasy encounters between Mursi and tourists in southern Ethiopia", Anthropology Today, 20:3, 3-8, 2004.
• Shauna Latosky, "Reflections on the lip-plates of Mursi women as a source of stigma and self-esteem", in Ivo Strecker and Jean Lydall (eds.) The perils of face: Essays on cultural contact, respect and self-esteem in southern Ethiopia, Mainzer Beiträge zur Afrika-Forschung, Lit Verlag, Berlin, 2006, pp. 371-386.
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