Eliot Elisofon was an internationally known photographer and filmmaker whose enduring visual record of African life from 1947 to 1972 was published in magazines such as Life and the National Geographic.
As a filmmaker, he worked on film and television projects including the Black African Heritage Series (1972), a four-part documentary on African arts and cultures. Elisofon’s association with the National Museum of African Art began as a founding trustee in 1964. Over the span of his career, Elisofon travelled to six continents. He made 11 trips to Africa, photographing, making films and collecting art.
Upon his death in 1973, Elisofon donated his African materials to the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., including over 50,000 black-and-white negatives and photographs, 30,000 color slides, and 120,000 feet of motion picture film and sound materials. The bequest became the foundation for the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives.
In 2013 the museum celebrated the 40th Anniversary of the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives and art collection with the exhibition Africa Re-Viewed: The Photographic Legacy of Eliot Elisofon.
Elisofon’s images are significant for the way they helped change American perceptions of Africa in the 20th century, which had for the most part been informed by inaccurate literary and film representations.
His photos also offer important glimpses into the production of African art. His one big desire was to help people understand what these artifacts meant to Africans themselves and how they’re used and performed, their symbolic meanings, and their cultural significance.
Elisofon was a collector of art and brought back more than 700 objects from Africa during the course of his life.
Via Slate.com AND NPR.org.
The Smithsonian Museum of African Art – http://africa.si.edu/
