A very good friend of mine, Mara Amats, was a great traveller especially to Africa. An accomplished painter, her travels inspired her art, and in the sixties she was invited to advise and restore a number of frescoes for the Coptic churches of the Lake Tana region and Tigre province in Ethiopia. However, early into this trip she encountered a group of beggars working on the streets and was impressed with their embroidery skills. Haile Selassie, who had dismissed all the workers from his ‘robes department’, once employed these beggars. Taking up their cause she persuaded the palace to give money so that they might buy materials to set up a proper business. She taught them the basics of what was fashionable in the West so that they could use their skills to their advantage and to a wider audience and soon had an early thriving ‘Trade not Aid’ project. This project proved to be apocalyptic and later she set up similar projects in many other African countries, India, the Caribbean and various regions of the then Soviet Union. When I first met her she was working on a project with Nepalese women and had found a way to make beautiful paper out of water hyacinth. This was sold to the Body Shop and also ended up as various paper products in the Conran Shop. Ironically this plant that multiplied at an alarming rate was causing the local river to stagnate. So with her foresight and ingenuity she found a way of saving the river and giving the local women an artistic industry whose products found a worldwide market. Further along the river she found another village that was struggling economically. Here she found a mushroom that was part of the villager’s staple diet. Bringing some mushrooms back to London she took them to her friend the chef and restaurateur, Antonio Carluccio. Before long Carluccio was buying this new ‘fungi’ by the sack full so establishing a lifeline to an impoverished people.
Her London flat was full of items; fabric, furniture, tribal items, even bits of bone or skulls, that she had collected on these travels and we had endless talks, accompanied with a plentiful supply of red wine, on how best we could bring this collection together in a series of photographs. We knew that we didn’t want a museum type catalogue; with the items shot against a white background and eventually I decided that we needed appropriate models to wear or accompany the items.
Finding the models was more than a little problematic as many beautiful black African girls wanted to be portrayed in a more fashionable western ‘streetwise’ style as opposed to a more tribal style from their countries of origin. With persistence I finally persuaded a couple of London students to model for me.
This image of Nacee captured the style that I wanted to explore and I felt confident that we would create a series of shots that would be worthy of a book and an exhibition. I took the shot in my studio and Nacee is wearing a tribal headdress from Tanzania and is sitting on a stool, carved from a solid block of wood, from Nigeria. I shot it on my Mamiya RZ 67 camera using Agfa APX 100 film. I used a single light coming from the side together with a large polyboard to reflect light back into the shadows. Alex Dow, my digital guru, then scanned the negative and printed it on HahnemÜlle FineArt Photo Rag paper. Mara loved the image and together with her husband, Gil Devlin, we started to sort out items that not only would make great shots but that Mara could add an anecdote, a poem or historical note to.
At this time my studio in London was constantly busy with commercial work and Mara and Gil were always travelling so the project kept being put back time and time again. Then tragedy struck. Mara was diagnosed with cancer and after a long and painful period in which she continued to paint, she died in September 2007. I miss her enthusiasm, creativity and conversation, which, at times, could get passionate. I have this picture hanging in my home in London and it is a constant reminder of her how inspirational I found her.
With Gil I hope to revive this project as it would be a great pity if the magnificent collection that she accumulated over the years were to be split up or lost.
This shot is available as a limited edition print. There will only be 50 copies. Each one will be signed and numbered by John Freeman and will be accompanied by a certificate of authentication together with a unique hologram on the reverse of the print. The overall paper size measures 483 X 329 mm in this edition. Each print is printed on 100% 308 gsm rag paper and is wood pulp and acid free and has archival permanence.
The cost of each print is £250.00. However, as the edition sells out the price increases i.e. after ten prints are sold the price will be £300.00 for numbers 11 – 20. For numbers 21 – 30 the price will be £375.00 per print. For numbers 31 – 40 the cost will be £475.00 per print. For numbers 41 – 50 the cost will be £650.00 per print. The next available print is 4/50.
Very nice picture!