Photographer: Goldstein, Henri (1920-2014).
Title: untitled (femme Uélé region).
Date: 1949.
Country: Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Medium: unmounted gelatin silver print.
Size: 24,0 x 17,8 cm.
Condition: very good.
Reference: HGV1115/1
Provenance:  Belgian vintage photograpy dealer.
Extra: typed note with identification in French. Congopresse 22.332/37.
In the Uélé, especially in the territory of the Mangbetu, Makere and that of Niangara, one finds, among various forms of indigenous art, curious carved stools. These are reserved for women. Tradition teaches them how this small piece of furniture must be carried. Tradition also teaches them how to sit and how to behave in public. With the legs at a sharp angle, the knees together, the torso straight, the hands placed on the knees, the gaze distant and avoiding eye contact with the interlocutor or passer-by — this is the hieratic, almost ritual posture of the women of these regions. This posture reveals its full beauty when worn with traditional dress: a black skirt made of beaten and dyed bark, an elongated hairstyle decorated with monkey bones, and the lower back protected by the ‘negbe,’ an oval ornament made of banana leaves combined with decorative motifs of great inventiveness.
Henri Goldstein (1920 – 2014) was an apprentice at the Belgian press agency Acta from the age of 14. Working in the Congo, he became a renowned photographer of equatorial wildlife. In this capacity, he accompanied American scientific expeditions and exhibited in New York. During the war he was a prisoner of war in Germany, notably in the fortress of Colditz in Saxony, then in the disciplinary camp 1446 Torfwerk in the Himmelmoor near Hamburg, and thus escaped the extermination camps, even though he was Jewish. He returned to Leopoldville in 1947 and became head of the photography department of the colonial information service until the colony unexpectedly gained its independence in 1960. At the end of 1992, he published his memories under the title "Les maillons de la chaîne" (Ed. Dricot).