Mitch Alland
Offline
• • •
Upload & Sell: Off
|
 p.2327 #9 · Leica M/X/T/S/Q/CL/SL Picture Thread | |
Turkanaland, Kenya 1965
This 1965 picture was taken in Turkanaland in north-west Kenya, near Lodwar, at that time a very small town. I was driving alone, back from Lake Turkana, in a VW Beetle, not on roads but on tracks in the desert, until I reached the Uganda trunk road that runs from Nairobi to Kampala. The distance from Lake Turkana to Kampala was 670 km. As I recall, it took me 14 hours and I got back home at midnight, driving as fast on the Uganda highway as the Beetle would go and crashing into a dog that raced across the unlit road a half an hour before I reached Kampala.
The Turkana, a Nilotic people with language and culture similar to that of the Maasai and Samburu in Kenya and the Karamojong in Uganda were, and still are, nomadic pastoralists, with cattle at the core of their culture. They remain one of the poorest ethnic groups in Kenya. I recall a friend, the Ford Foundation representative for East Africa, whom I was meeting at Lake Turkana telling me that the lake was teeming with fish, and that the Turkana, often near starvation, could vastly improve their lives if they fished and ate fish.
In a web search, I found that the Norwegian aid agency invested US$22 million in the late-1970s in a huge fish-freezing plant aimed at the Turkana exploiting the lake’s fish stocks; it failed soon after startup. The Turkana, like other East-African semi-nomadic pastoralists live off the milk, blood and meat of their herds. Also, the cost of electricity to operate the giant freezers, and the demand for clean water in the desert environment, were too high.
Shot in extremely bright and harsh light, the picture is from a low contrast negative shot on Adox KB17 (ISO 40) with a Leica IIIc and Summarit 50 lens and has a muddy tonal palette that I was never able to print well in the darkroom. I digitalized the negative and got the same muddy tonalities, which I processed in a variety of ways: some of the versions I made dark, in one effort bringing out a brooding black cloud; but that took away from the desolation of the huts and people. Finally, I went for the high-key look here, which best reflects what I remember seeing. However, I didn’t post these pictures until I saw a similar tonality in a photograph in David Vestal’s The Craft Photography, showing tractors in what looks like Iowa farmland (page 328).
Turkanaland, Kenya 1965
|
