LIZ GILBERT: Broken Spears & The Last Safari : NOMAD OF THE WEEK: AFRICA

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Friday, 05th January
LIZ GILBERT: Broken Spears & The Last Safari : NOM...

photographs courtesy of liz gilbert

When did you visit Africa for the first time?
Peter Beard scribbled his address on a napkin in a restaurant in New York in 1991 and told me to come out and visit. I arrived in Kenya with the napkin three months later. That was the beginning of a twenty-year adventure.

I started as a news photographer based in Nairobi, working for TIME, Newsweek and The New York Times. Journalism assignments took me all over Africa, though I spent most of my time in Somalia, Rwanda and the Congo. There was so much suffering, violence and conflict in East Africa then.

Eventually, I decided to leave the business and turn my cameras toward something beautiful. That is when I began working with the Maasai people, living and traveling among traditional African tribes. This passion became a seven-year odyssey documenting the ceremonies and culture in the Great Rift Valley.

I was fortunate to have two photographic books published on these vanishing ways of life -Broken Spears: A Maasai Journey and Tribes of the Great Rift Valley.

The director, Matt Goldman, describes The Last Safari as 'a love letter' to a bygone era.

September 2013