Essay by Kevin Conru, Klaus-Jochen Krüger, Margarett Loke,
and Christina Angela Thomas
Photographs by Hugo A. Bernatzik
The second book in a three part series, "Bernatzik: Africa" presents the finest images of the Austrian ethnographer and photographer Hugo A. Bernatzik.
Beginning in 1925, Bernatzik travelled to Egypt, photographing the people, the domestic and religious architecture, the antiquities and, in the southern region, the outstanding natural landscapes and wildlife. He returned to Egypt in 1927, journeying through to the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. He originally planned to photograph wildlife around Lake Rudolf, but found that the area was closed to outsiders by the English authorities. He instead chose, fortuitously, to travel down the White Nile, almost to its source at the Belgian Congo. On this journey he encountered people never before photographed, including the Dinka, the Nuer, the Shilluk and the Eastern Jur. He sojourned from the mountain fastnesses of the Nuba to the malarial swamps of Malakal, all the while photographing the inhabitants and their world. His remarkable series of photographs of these Nubian people predate by a generation the work of George Rodgers and later that of Leni Riefenstahl.
