Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Indonesia: Men Of Timor


A 1968 portrait of men of Kupang, capital of the Indonesian part of Timor Island. I shot it while on assignment for Venture magazine to illustrate Christopher Lucas’ article, Indonesia is a Happening, which he later turned into a book.

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Monday, July 28, 2014

Ecuador: Colorado Male Elegance


On the western slopes of Ecuador’s Andes Mountains near Santo Domingo, a Colorado man reddens his hair with achiote, soft grains he extracted from the green pods in the foreground. Achiote easily turns into a paste when rubbed between hands.

In Brazil, where achiote is known as urucu, Yanomami Indians press it into oblong balls to paint their bodies as if with markers.
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Sunday, July 27, 2014

Ecuador: Colorado Indian


Colorado elder with hair reddened with achiote, a general custom of his tribe, which dwells in the lower Western Andes Mountains, near Santo Domingo de los Colorados. That custom is at the origin of the Spanish name by which they are best known.
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Saturday, July 26, 2014

Colombia: Managing The Small Farm


Along a small road in the Cauca Department’s share of the Cordillera Oriental, one of three Andean cordilleras splitting Colombia north-south, a spirited farmer is splitting logs for her family’s fire while watching over her two small children nearby.
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Friday, July 25, 2014

Colombia: Walking In The Rain



Walking through a rainstorm along a road in Colombia’s Cundinamarca department, this old farmer had wrapped himself in a large plastic sheet.
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Thursday, July 24, 2014

The Wonderful World Of Madagascar’s Périnet Natural Reserve

Professional people and wildlife photography are full-time jobs, and each requires its own skills and experience. I love both people and animals but can’t hold two full-time jobs. So I have dedicated myself to photographing people, mostly away from tourists’ maps.

However, I have had occasional need to shoot wildlife. One of them, a few years ago, happened in Madagascar. I was photographing the country for two books on that subject. And on their lists of needed illustrations were the Périnet Natural Reserve and its variety of lemurs and chameleons. 


Fortunately, I needed no special skills or experience to photograph chameleons and lemurs. I could have touched the chameleons. As for the lemurs, they were as curious about me as I was about them. And, charming animals, they let me get quite close to them too. I spent a wonderfully quite morning in their company.


Ring-tailed lemurs (lemur catta)


Verreaux's sifaka lemur (propithecus verreaux)


Verreaux's sifaka lemur (propithecus verreaux)


Grey bamboo lemur (hapalemur briseus)


Brown lemur (lemur fulvus)


Ruffed lemur (lvarecia variegata)




Ruffed lemur (lvarecia variegata)


Ruffed lemur (lvarecia variegata)


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Tuesday, July 22, 2014

Colombia: Bogota Gold Museum

In my last post, with the 15 pictures of looters of pre-Colombian graves in Colombia, I mentioned how many of the best stolen pieces end up in the pre-Columbian collection of Bogota’s Gold Museum. At least in 1979, at the time I was photographing the looters at work. Hereafter are eight of the pictures I took at the museum that year.


Funeral chamber of a pre-Columbian cacique.


Funerary mask and other gold ornaments that followed a cacique to his grave.



Tumaco gold mask.


Calima gold mask.


Tolima breast plates.


Muisca raft carrying a new cacique, coated with gold dust, and lesser chiefs to the middle of Lake Guatavita. There they unloaded gold and emeralds into the lake and El Dorado, the Gilded One, ritually washed the gold dust off his body in it.


Gloomy lake Guatavita. In a vain effort to drain the lake and get hold of its legendary treasures, greed-crazed conquistadors during the Spanish conquest carved out the gap in the far shore.


The Gold Museum makes you enter its last room, behind heavy steel doors, in total darkness, the better to overwhelm your eyes and mind when the lights slowly come up. The room’s walls are lined with 12 showcases like this one, each crammed with more gold loot than the next.
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Sunday, July 20, 2014

Colombia: Stealing The Gold Of El Dorado


At dawn one morning, comforted by a pack of cigarettes and a bottle of aguardiente, a Colombian farmer leaves his mud-brick house to go treasure hunting. He and four friends identified a possible pre-Columbian grave site among many others long excavated around it and filled in again to keep cattle safe. Somewhere in this area of the Calima culture, one grave had once delivered 18 pounds of gold. But all the best graves have already been sacked long ago, and expectations are relatively low.


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In 1979, on assignment for Geo, I photographed guaqueros, or grave robbers, in Colombia’s western cordillera as they excavated a pre-Columbian grave high amid the clouds. Geo is, and remains, a top German magazine. It also has a French edition, and at the time it had an American edition as well. Geo titled the story, written by Pat Rotter, Stealing the Gold of El Dorado.

The excavation of the 13-meter deep grave took two long days of hard work by four men taking turns digging. It would have taken them considerably longer if pre-Colmbian Indians had not already broken the ground before them. Digging out such graves was as illegal in 1979 as it is today. But there were few archaeologists available to dig the many thousands gold-filled graves all over the country. Besides, grave robbers were hard to catch, and the risk of seeing priceless treasures leave the country to foreign collectors had to be minimized. So the director of the Gold Museum of Bogota, Colombia’s capital, had no choice but to close his eyes on the theft. This gave him at least a chance to be the first to examine, and eventually buy, the best pieces offered to him in total liberty. Ninety percent of the astounding collection of Bogota’s Gold Museum had been purchased from guaqueros. I don’t know how things work today.

Colombian archaeologists were not happy with this state of affairs. While they worked slowly to avoid losing or damaging evidence, greedy uneducated guaqueros had no such worries. They had to work fast before getting robbed themselves. And in the end they separated gold from other artifacts, including carbon-bearing ceramic vessels, which helped to date the graves. But there was little archaeologists could do about it, other than sometimes work with guaqueros to limit their damages. The fact was that if archaeologists had the science, guaqueros had the uncanny clairvoyance.


Here two of the men inspect the dirt their media cañas plugged out from the site they came to prospect. Media cañas are half-open cylindrical tools at the end of two-and-a-half-meter-long poles. Soil is often composed of layers, like black humus over reddish clay, for instance. However, once pre-Columbian Indians had excavated the ground to bury a person, the dirt they later threw back into the grave ended up in mixed colors. The guaqueros looked for mixed soil and found it. They then kept plugging the ground until finding the exact grave pit's edge.



Taking turns to dig the grave.





Lowering a bucket to be refilled by the man below after having been emptied above.  


As the excavation advances, a manigueta, or hand-turned winch, has been installed to lower a man into it. It would serve to extricate him from the hole once another man’s turn to dig would come.

The kneeling man with the striped shirt, Guillermo Cano, directed the operation. Son and grandson of guaqueros, he himself had sold to the Gold Museum more than a third of its collection of 28.000 pieces. According to a 1991 article in El Tiempo, a Colombian newspaper, Guillermo’s grandfather had fallen into a pre-Columbian grave while repairing a road as an underpaid laborer. That grave, loaded with 18 pounds of gold, had initiated the family’s guaquero tradition. In 1968, Dory, Guillermo’s wife, started a gallery selling perfect commercial reproductions of pre-Columbian gold pieces and other jewelry and ornaments. The gallery since then has multiplied in several Colombian cities. One of Guillermo’s sons is now an archaeologist.


 Working the manigueta.


Six meters below the surface, less than half-way down, the digging man's bent back is hardly visible. The holes in one of the well’s walls had allowed the ancient Calima excavators to get up and down it as needed.


To get some of my pictures, I, too, had to go down the pit sometimes. My camera bag traveled down separately.


Finally, as dusk loomed at the end of the second day, the guaqueros touched bottom. They allowed me to quickly go down a last time before they would empty the grave, fearful that other farmers might come and do it during the night. It was so dark down there that I could not see what I was shooting. I also had some trouble breathing. So I blindly shot flash pictures at random all around the grave. This picture here shows the alcove where the body was laid to rest and some of the artifacts that accompanied it. Nested inside the alcove, the dead was not touched by the dirt that was thrown back into the pit after the burial.


As night fell, the grave was quickly emptied. The most exciting piece, taken away too quickly for me to photograph it, had everyone very excited. No one had ever seen anything like it. It was a clay vessel nearly a meter long with a wonderful head—big nose and ears.


 Not much gold, however. Only two nose rings, a thin one and a thick one, the latter weighing five grams. But then, the grave wasn’t very old--probably from between A.D. 1200 and 1500.



Later in Pasto, in the country’s south, I found more impressive gold jewelry in the hands of another guaquero.


Then In Bogota, on two different days and shabby hotel rooms, I was allowed to photograph the man in black buying pre-Columbian antiquities from a guaquero to resell to collectors.


That same man, sitting in the middle of the bed, as he was ready to write a check.
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Saturday, July 19, 2014

Morocco: Berber Woman And Daughter


Morocco. High Atlas Mountains. Ait Haddidu Berber mother and daughter (1967).

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Morocco: High Atlas Berbers

A 1967 photo of AÏt Haddidu Berber sisters from Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains.

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Thursday, July 17, 2014

Morocco: How Berbers Play


In 1967, during my four-month journey around Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains photographing several Berber tribes, I was treated everywhere like a long-lost friend. There was no electricity, no television. But there was a heartwarming social life.

Except when dancing to celebrate a Moslem festival, women and men kept apart from each other. Men with men and women with women. But both sexes always worked and played and chatted in often large friendly groups. Everyone cared for the other. And they all cared for me.

They worked hard in the fields, in the kitchens, and at the distaffs and looms. And they played just as hard, as if they never tired. Even after a long work day, the women leapfrogged and the men played a local variety of hockey. Or they used rag balls in other spirited games, like this one, as the long March night was looming.
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Wednesday, July 16, 2014

Morocco: Riding A Mule Under Eternal Snow

Here’s another 1967 picture shot in Morocco’s High Atlas mountains. The big Ait Haddidu Berber vllage, in the beautiful Dades Valley, was Imilchil.
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Tuesday, July 15, 2014

Morocco: Hard-Working Girl


Spirited Ait Haddidu Berber girl up in a moor in Morocco’s High Atlas Mountains to uproot some low brushes to feed her family’s fire.

In 1967 I spent four months living among Morocco’s Berbers. My story, Trek by Mule Among Morocco’s Berbers made the cover of the June 1968 issue of National Geographic magazine.
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Monday, July 14, 2014

Why Were Women Ever Called The Weak Sex?


In 1982, on assignment to illustrate a Time-Life book on Brazil’s Yanomami Indians, I shared those wonderful people’s lives for a month. Thanks to Bruce Albert, a young anthropologist who spoke their language and was deeply loved by them, I never missed a good photo opportunity.  The book was part of a series called People of the Wild.
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Saturday, July 12, 2014

Peru: Shy Girls, Vibrant Boys



 Here’s a broader view of the small gang my last post showed you of VillaSalvador, a shantytown in the desert outskirts of Lima, Peru—stoic girls on one side and worked-up boys on the other.
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Friday, July 11, 2014

Peru: Rough And Tumble


In the late seventies I spent some weeks photographing life in several slums of Lima, Peru, including that of Villa Salvador, out in the desert, where I shot this picture. As usual, I enjoyed myself most around children. I could not have made them happier if I had brought them ice cream. They were grateful for my attention and expected nothing else from me. They did not know they were poor and could not have behaved better towards me.
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Thursday, July 10, 2014

Philippines: Aren't Children Similar Everywhere?


I shot this bunch of students as they left school one afternoon in Tacloban,  in Philippines’ Leyte Island, ready for some fun and not the least intimidated by the foreign photographer. I was ready for some fun myself.
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Wednesday, July 9, 2014

Ecuador: More On Montubios' Day

Hereafter are a few additional photos to illustrate my last post yesterday about Montubios’ Day parade in Ecuador’s Salitre. To view it again click on yesterday’s date or go to






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Tuesday, July 8, 2014

Ecuador: Montubio Day


    The Montubios, as the mestizos of Ecuador’s coastal lowlands call themselves, celebrate October 12 not as America’s Columbus Day, or Latin America’s Día de la Raza, but as Día de los Montubios. And not just on that day but over three. I watched all three days and found them all worth my photographer’s time. Still, the first day was the most exciting. I did not see any foreigners there, nor did I notice Andean Ecuadoreans, but the event, playing out most famously in Salitre, a small town at a 40-minute taxi ride from Guayaquil, is very local.

That first day featured a morning parade and an afternoon rodeo. Circling the small town, the parade was dedicated entirely to groups of folkloric dancers of all ages and backgrounds.

The day started quietly with elegant amazons riding through the streets of Salitre, waiting to join the parade and obviously proud of displaying their ample dresses, which covered their horses as in medieval times. Each of the numerous dance groups was headed by a motorized tricycle taxi broadcasting the lively music needed to support the colorful dancers. Though I was never a fan of parades, I enjoyed that one.

For pictures of the rodeo that day go to my April 18 post:
http://victorenglebertphotography.blogspot.com/search?q=ecuador+rodeo+

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