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"African Ceremonies"
A photographic masterwork illuminates a continent's life-spanning range of cultural rites.
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Also Today "African Ceremonies" A photographic masterwork illuminates a continent's life-spanning range of cultural rites. By Karen Templer Portfolio African Ceremonies A portfolio of photographs by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher (Click to display images in a new browser window. Best viewed with browsers higher than 3.0) Slide Show African Interview Listen to the detailed accounts of the stories behind the photographs by Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher (Real Player) African Ceremonies (2 Volumes) By Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher Harry N. Abrams Inc.

In the ensuing hour, as their words transported us back to an Africa we all love, I was filled with inspiration and admiration for these women -- Beckwith, an American graduate of the Boston Museum School of Fine Arts, and Fisher, an Australian-born social-science graduate of Adelaide University -- who had had the sensitivity, intelligence and persistence to glimpse the African soul and, even more amazing, gain an intimate access to that soul as no other foreigners ever had. And I felt a profound gratitude that they had chosen to offer up these glimpses in a sumptuous celebration that all of us can share -- and that will enrich our lives and the lives of generations to come, around the globe.

A major exhibition of photographs from "African Ceremonies" will open at the Brooklyn Museum of Art in New York on July 14 and run through Sept. 27. The book is available at most bookstores and through online booksellers.

"African Ceremonies" is such a monumental work. How did you originally come up with the idea for the book?

Beckwith: Carol and I both had a dream that we wanted to record all the ancient ceremonies and cultures in Africa, across the continent, before these wonderful traditions disappear. We had just finished a book called "African Ark," which was a five-year collaboration about the Horn of Africa, and people said to us, "Are you going to do another book?" and we looked at each other and thought, "This is the moment to start."

"African Ceremonies" was a 10-year project. The first year was taken raising funds in America to cover the fieldwork. We really wanted to tell a story in Africa that goes into every kind of passage in life that people take: the transition from birth to initiation, then from courtship to marriage and then finally into adult life and gaining richness. Then we did a series of communal ceremonies that included seasonal ceremonies, and ceremonies of religious beliefs and healing, and the final passage of life, which is the passage of death and the passage into the afterworld -- the world that many Africans actually view as greater than the world that we're in today.

How did you plan such an ambitious project?

Fisher: We actually put up a very large pegboard around the room, and we would pin up ceremonies that we knew existed, according to the months. We had January through to December on the pegboard, and we would say to ourselves, "Right, we know that the traversing of the Niger River in Mali is something that happens in December, and the great cattle crossings are December to January," so we'd make a little mark there.

We put everything we could possibly think of onto that board and then we started researching and finding out the ceremonies that, say, happen every 12 years -- could we get that into this period? Or could we get, say, a Masai passage from warriorhood to elderhood, which is once every seven years in Kenya, onto the board? And we made a kind of organizational plan where if a ceremony happened only once every year or once every several years, that ceremony got priority. And then we would map out year by year.

It sounds very organized, but Africa is completely different from that, so what we would find is that we'd set off with a plan to record a king's 25th anniversary, let's say. That was a set date, so we could record that, and then we thought we would go on to do a fantasy coffin funeral -- and we'd find that there wasn't one at the moment, but there was something else happening with voodoo on the border of Ghana and Togo. So suddenly we were off to record that. We really kept our eyes open and asked a lot of questions, and sometimes got some of the best ceremonies completely unexpectedly off the backs of ones we'd already planned. Eventually, we spent six to seven months a year -- not all in one visit but in several visits per year -- for the 10 years to record the ceremonies, and learned a lot through the process.

So the book was organically growing as you were in the field, finding out about new ceremonies?

Beckwith: Yes, we initially thought that the book would take us three to four years. After three to four years, we realized that if we could achieve this coverage in 10 years, it would be fantastic. At the end of 10 years, we had over 200,000 images, which had to be edited down to the best 850. We had the most intense year of editing images, of deciding which ceremonies represented a category, how to give the expanse of the whole continent showing the richness and diversity of it, how to contrast one side with the other in terms of marriage rituals and the like.

And there were so many surprises along the way.

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