© Minden Pictures – Chris Johns, South Africa, 1995
p. 268: A walking stick on one shoulder, a hunting bow slung over the other, a Bushman watches relatives stride across the dunes near the boundary of Kalahari Gemsbok National Park.
National Geographic has long shared extraordinary photographs accompanied by compelling stories from every corner of the world. In the series Around the World in 125 Years this volume on Africa presents approximately two hundred photographs from the National Geographic archives, plus forty new images of Africa’s landscapes, history, cultures, and wildlife.
This journey across Africa ranges from evocative early black-and-white photographs and autochromes to the golden age of Kodachrome and the digital era.
p. 143 Kenyans trudging along a road battle clouds of flying locusts. Spawned in the vast deserts to the north, periodic irruptions of locusts brought millions of insects descending upon everything in sight, devouring crops, destroying grasslands and forests, even covering roads so thickly that cars skidded out of control.
Aerial photographs of Uganda’s misty volcanoes from the 1950s, archaeologists in Egypt’s cool tombs, Zimbabwe’s gleaming skyscrapers, Chokwe people in Angola wearing ritual masks, alleys and souks in Algeria’s old quarters, delicate red flowers in South Africa’s Drakensberg, Kenyan farmers fighting swarms of locusts, and mountain gorillas basking in the Rwandan sun all appear in the collection.
Decades before the Travel Channel and Google Images existed, these photographs already captured Africa’s spectacular landscapes. Beyond wildlife and diversity, they also illuminate compelling stories of rural hardship, environmental threats, and the legacy of forced colonization.
The volume is a tribute to a unique continent and to one of the world’s best-known photography magazines.
National Geographic. Around the World in 125 Years. Africa
Pages: 312
Price: €49.99
Publisher: Taschen/Librero
ISBN: 9783836568760
