The Ovahimba Years – Rina Sherman

After Rina Sherman was exiled from her native South Africa in 1984 she settled in Paris, acting in independent theatre and working in television. She studied at the Sorbonne under the celebrated ethnographer and film-maker Jean Rouch, completing her doctorate with distinction in 1990.

Like Rouch she is a writer, filmmaker and ethnographer and in 1997 was awarded a Lavoisier Research Bursary by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs which enabled her to live for  seven years with an Omuhimba community in Namibia and Angola, filming and photographing their every day and ritual lives.

In 2014 she donated her multimedia Ovahimba archive to the French National Library, where there will be an exhibition of the work from 29 Sept 2015 to 15 Nov 2015.

You can see some photographs and films from this project on her web site, where there is also a link to a crowd-funding project to publish a book of some of her photographs, The Ovahimba Years – Rina Sherman.  As rewards for contributing you are offered your choice of archival inkjet prints from three galleries of work, in sizes from A5 to A2 depending on your contribution – the smallest print goes for a mere $25 plus shipping, with $1200 getting you three A2 prints, all unframed. If the project fails to reach the goal of $17,800 USD needed for a high quality photographic publication you will still receive the prints and the monies contributed will be used to cover some of the publication costs of a text only print-on-demand book and an eBook.

There are only 11 days left to contribute to what seems an interesting work and to get quality signed prints at a reasonable price.

 

 

 

Leave a Reply

You must be logged in to post a comment.