Claude Lévi-Strauss
1930s (late)
Amazon Bororo scene

Gelatin silver print
11 x 14 in
 
Larry Gottheim, Be-hold, Inc
Courtesy of Larry Gottheim - Be-Hold (50 / 48)
 
20 fabulous vintage gelatin-silver prints, ca. 1940, 11" x 14" or the reverse. These are exciting portraits and ceremonial scenes of these Amazon natives. There is no imprint. "Mishkin/ South Amer." is written in pen on the verso. This most likely refers to a previous owner of the prints, as no photographer would give his location in such a general way, and there is no known photographer or anthropologist by that name who worked in this area during that period.
 
Robert Carneiro, specialist in S. American anthropology at the New York Museum of Natural History, kindly offered the suggestion that the photographer was the great anthropologist Lévi-Strauss, who studied and photographed the Bororo in the late 1930's. Some of his photographs appear in "Tristes Tropiques," (first published in France in 1955) and a wider selection in "Saudades do Brasil; a Photographic Memoir," American edition published by the U. of Washington Press in 1995). Claude's father was a painter and photographer, and the son first photographed with his father. The published images are a selection from "about three thousand negatives" (p. 22.)
 
While there is no exact match with a published image, not only the content but the style is exactly that of Lévi-Strauss.
 
LL/22382