Feeling the Spirit: Searching the World for the People of Africa - Hardcover

Higgins, Chester

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0553095560 ISBN 13: 9780553095562

Publisher: Bantam Dell Pub Group, 1994

Synopsis

Through more than two hundred black-and-white photographs and an accompanying text, a celebrated photojournalist for the New York Times explores African history, traditions, and personality as seen in people of African descent throughout the world. Major ad/promo.

About this title

From the Author:

A look at the world community of the African Diaspora.
My favorite review; Sunday Book Review Los Angeles Times December 11, 1994 From Image to Icon Thirty years of pursuing the African Diaspora By Richard Eder A back-lit profile of the late Emperor Haile Selassie of Ethiopia, head inclined slightly. The unadorned upward sweep of a heavy white veil and two globe-like dark eyes glistening above it: a young Black Muslim woman in New York. The silhouette of another woman in the sunlit doorway of a pitch-black room and beyond the opening, the ocean: the Senegalese dungeon's "Door of No Return" through which Africans were forced onto the slave ships. Among other things, photographs can be icons, emitting a power that their subjects don't materially possess. Like icons, though, such photographs are not invented talismans. They allow the subjects to symbolize as well as represent themselves, as if light—the one arbitrary element that photography brings to the reality it depicts—did not simply fall upon a person, a tree or a house but welled up from inside them. A photographer's light can make the body the same shape as the soul. Throughout the 304 pages of Chester Higgins' "Feeling the Spirit" the images repeatedly grow into icons. .... To use the photographic term, it is sometimes overexposed. The same passion—to discover and celebrate the variety and unity of African culture in today's Africa and in the Western Hemisphere—informs Higgins' photographs. Without it there would be no book. But here it is inseparably joined to art and, if one can distinguish them, to some powerful disciplines. There is the beauty and revelation of the individual photographs. ....On page after page the photographer, lyrical and celebratory, disappears into his subjects. And he pulls us along with him. It is perhaps arbitrary to cite one photograph or another. How much we are affected by a particular shot will depend on the rhythm in which we arrive at it. Any first-rate book of photographs has a rhythm to it; the selection and ordering which, by continuity and contrast, build to a series of climaxes and separate the climaxes with quieter, meditative asides. But rhythm is particularly powerful in Higgins' book. (His picture editor, Kathy Ryan, has been a brilliant collaborator.) ....Over three decades, Higgins has journeyed with a camera to write his own story. He wins powerfully; he takes us on his journey.

From the Inside Flap:

Africans not because we are born in Africa, but because Africa is born in us. Look  around you and behold us in our greatness.  Greatness is an African possibility; you can make it  yours. " -- Chester Higgins Jr.

In  Feeling the Spirit, Chester Higgins Jr.  tells the story of a people -- by capturing the fierce  dignity, enduring traditions and empowering  spirituality that live in all men and women of African  descent throughout the world. Higgins' odyssey of  discovery has spanned three decades and led him  across boundaries of geography, nationality, and  culture. In these pages Higgins combines 220 tri-tone  black-and-white images with his own evocative  prose to share the findings of his journey. From  reclaiming a long-misrepresented history, to providing  a rare, intimate look at sacred rituals passed  d

About this edition

• Publisher: Bantam Dell Pub Group
• Publication date: 1994
• ISBN 10: 0553095560
• ISBN 13: 9780553095562
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 303