Word: fisher
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...pair often spend months at a time traveling through remote regions by car, mule or camel, with no means of communication with the outside world. In order to gain the trust of wary tribes, Beckwith and Fisher may live with the locals for weeks or even months, befriending the chief and integrating themselves as much as possible into daily life. The women usually work through a translator--sometimes two, in the case of especially rare dialects. Being female has made it easier to gain access to rites that outsiders rarely witness. Notes Fisher: "We're less threatening to the women...
...took Beckwith and Fisher 19 years to win permission to photograph the six-week-long Dogon Dama funeral ceremony in Mali, in which bodies are wrapped in cloths and hauled 300 ft. up a sheer cliff face to burial caves that have been in use since the 15th century. To get a shot of the interior of one of those caves, the duo had to be lowered from the top of the cliff by means of ropes and handmade ladders...
...always take place on schedule. Indeed, when the women showed up to film the Dogon funeral ceremony--which occurs only once every 12 years--they discovered that it wouldn't begin for six more weeks. "We often end up sitting and waiting for events to happen," says Fisher. Despite these obstacles, the pair have photographed scores of ceremonies, including initiation rites, male and female circumcisions, bridal fairs and weddings, funerals and even exorcisms...
...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...
...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...