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Manfred Metzner and Michael M. Thoss
Editors
The Pierre Verger Foundation lies in one of the rapidly expanding
suburbs of Salvador da Bahía not far from the expressway
Vila América, with which the coastal town spreads its
feelers deep into the hinterland. What was once Verger’s
private residence, purchased by the worldly photographer in
1960, today houses his immense archive with photographs spanning
four decades and five continents.
A few years ago, when we visited the one-storied house for
the first time, it seemed as though its inhabitant had stepped
out for a moment, or was on one of his many trips: in the
afternoon heat the shutters were closed over windows without
panes of glass; his broken eyeglasses, held together by strips
of adhesive tape, were left on the wooden writing table; and
beside this was the narrow, covered bed that he installed
during his last years. In a bureau was Verger’s handwritten
correspondence. His extensive private library was arranged
on metal shelves. And the archive cabinet, overflowing with
countless negatives, attested not only to his ascetic lifestyle
and sense of order, but also to the respect of the many friends
of this master photographer who died in 1996.
Today the majority of the circa 62,000 surviving negatives
exist in a digital format and are even accessible on the homepage
of the Fundaçao Pierre Verger. On entering
the foundation, visitors are received by a friendly coworker
as well as by the vast number of books and catalogs the foundation
published over recent years. One learns that Pierre Verger’s
spirit has even returned to the old quarter of Salvador, where,
not far from his first apartment located in the Pelourinho,
the foundation opened a photo-gallery a few months ago.
In August of 1946, when Pierre Verger disembarked from the
steamer arriving from Rio de Janeiro and set foot on land
in Salvador, in his heart he had already taken leave of Europe
and the grand society of Paris from which he came. The picture-taking
nomad was so awed by the charm of Brazil’s former capital
and its citizens that, over the next 50 years, he chose it
as the center of his life and as his base and starting point
for countless trips to Africa. He was warmly accepted by the
art bohemia of Bahia, and was soon a close friend of the writer
Jorge Amado, the sculptor Mario Cravo, the painter Carybé,
and the folk singer Dorval Caymmi. The possibility of being
accepted by strangers and merging with their community was
a basic condition crucial to Verger’s photographic work.
In addition, for a European fleeing the effects of World War
II, Bahia probably suggested the counter-image of a continent
marked by war and genocide: "All throughout Brazil one
finds a generous and tolerant spirit. In Bahia, however, the
race relations seem to produce the greatest human warmth.
All religious expressions enjoy a far-reaching tolerance here,
so that the cult surrounding certain African deities can be
maintained with an impressive authenticity..." [1]
With great diversity, Verger’s work illustrates how
up into the present the common African heritage in Brazil,
the Caribbean and North America finds expression in music,
dance and architecture as well as in art and cuisine. In his
fascinating photographs and writings on Afro-Brazilian and
Caribbean religious communities, Verger describes the reciprocal
influences in the transatlantic triangle up into our current
period. According to UNESCO findings, between 12 and 15 million
slaves were deported by Europeans into the so-called New World,
with circa 40% of them taken to Brazil. The collected memory
of this atrocity – the greatest theft of human life
in world history – was kept alive in ritual practices
of the Brazilian Candomblé *), Haitian voodoo, and Cuban
Santería. Verger realized how through such practices
both sides of the Atlantic engage in a cultural exchange with
one another since almost four centuries.
In present-day Europe, Pierre Verger is still unknown to
a broader audience. One reason for the delayed reception of
his work could be Verger’s modesty. He never gave serious
thought to commercializing his photographs. For him, photojournalism
was only a bread-and-butter job that allowed him to continue
his private research on African deities in the New World.
In Germany, in the mid-1970s, readers first became aware of
him through Hubert Fichte and Leonore Mau, following the publication
of collage-like impressions of Brazil, Haiti and Trinidad
by these authors, under the titles Xango and Petersilie
(Parsley). Verger’s archive served as a source of inspiration
for their research, and, if one believes the foundation’s
colleagues, it was through Verger that Fichte and Mau first
gained access to the Candomblé ceremonies and their
highest-ranking dignitaries. Later, of course, the reclusive
photographer felt deeply offended when Fichte outed him in
his text as a homosexual, after which the name of the German
writer was taboo in Verger’s presence. Today one could
call this a missed chance inasmuch as Fichte’s work,
as a "poetic anthropologist," was the aesthetic
approximation of Verger’s to his own subject and almost
akin to it
Unlike the friends also ethnologists from the Musée
de l’Homme in Paris, Roger Bastide and Alfred Métraux,
who often gave him their texts to correct, Verger’s
approach was deliberately undetached. He was the opposite
of an aloof observer; he never used the lens of his camera
as a partition between the observed object and the subject
being interpreted. Moreover, his almost obsessive attempts
to escape the middle-class milieu, and to subject himself
to extreme situations, prompted him to always see himself
as a part of his own experimental arrangement. There was method
in his empathy. He never saw sympathy and shock as obstacles;
they were the motivating forces of his understanding that
enabled him to place himself in the position of the other;
to overcome ethnic, social and epistemological barriers, and
to experience in this way – recalling Rimbaud –
oneself as the other: "To be honest, I’m only marginally
interested in ethnography. I don’t want to study people
as if they were just beetles or exotic plants. On my journeys,
what I like is living with people and learning their different
lifestyles. That’s because I’ve always been interested
in what I never was, or in what I could be with others."
[2]
Verger’s intuitive "turning toward his subjects"
stands for an ethical, basic stance in the making of his photographs.
This expresses itself in his portrait studies in particular.
His photography radically differs from ethnographical photography
based on measured gestures and the obscene gaze directed at
the object being photographed. By comparison, Verger had an
aversion to voyeurism; the subjects of his portraits were
never, so to speak, stripped bare. Even when documenting the
poorest of living situations – like on his first journey
to Africa in 1935/1936 – the people he photographed
maintained their personality and dignity. The ascending camera
angle, captured with his Rolleiflex hung from his neck, symbolically
reflects Verger’s own gaze: instead of looking down
at people, the lens of his Rolleiflex gazes up at them and
grants the person being photographed an almost heroic aura.
Verger’s remarkable ability to adapt to his surroundings
and transform himself "toward" people reached its
height in 1953, when he participated in the Babalao initiation
ceremony in Ketou (today Benin) and took on the new name of
Fatumbi. This act of "rebirth" as another
– as documented in Verger’s letters and writings
– made a number of his academic colleagues doubt his
credibility. Théodore Monod, director of the Institut
Français d’Afrique Noire (IFAN) in Dakar, also
Verger’s employer, informed him with tersely chosen
words that the research money was not put forward in order
to turn French ethnologists into "new pagans". If
not somewhat tragically, Verger’s photography paid the
price by losing a portion of its suggestive power, when he
began his academic work and prepared his doctorate on the
slave trade between the Golf of Benin and Salvador da Bahia,
completed in 1996. On the other hand, his Babalao title and
the adjoining right to practice the Yoruba divinity cult’s
Opele Ifa brought him great esteem in Salvador’s Afro-Brazilian
religious communities. The founders of Bahia’s first
Candomblé *) cult were, after all, said to have originated
from Ketou, also considered the spiritual homeland of most
Orisha *) cults.
Over the following years, Verger became transatlantic ambassador
of the Bahian Candomblé community in West Africa. Up
until 1979, he made as many as thirty trips to Africa. He
presented his photographs and audio recordings of Candomblé
rituals made in various traditional Yoruba communities. As
a countermove, he recorded the Orisha *) myths and cosmogonies
passed on orally from generation to generation. In this way,
Verger managed to once again intensify the relationships on
both sides of the Atlantic, after a considerable stretch of
time, by making clearly visible the origins of the Afro-American
Candomblé *) cult, voodoo and Santería, and their
present-day relevance, as well as their ability to adapt to
their respective society. By showing how the deification of
the Orishas *) in the New World could be traced to historical
figures in Africa, Verger became virtually indispensable as
a genealogical-tree researcher for the dignitaries of Salvador’s
religious communities, prone to compete among themselves.
Eloquent proof of this is found in his masterpiece Flux
und Reflux [3] and in his essays on
slaves sold into freedom, whose situations forced them to
repeatedly crisscross the Atlantic, as with the legendary
priestess Marcelina da Silva-Obatossi. So it often happened
that, on returning from Africa, Verger was received at the
airport by delegations of Bahian Candomblé who embraced
him as their ambassador.
It ranks as a great service to history that Verger and his
friend, Roger Bastide, documented how a cultural understanding
of the Candomblé *) cannot be explained solely on the
basis of historical origins or ethnic associations; how former
black slaves on the other side of the Atlantic had to rather
invent their culture, and how, in doing so, they also made
a substantial contribution to the modernity of both Americas.
Undoubtedly fascinating for Verger about the black gods –
often syncretized with Catholic saints in their American "exile"
(Roger Bastide) – was their inseparable presence in
nature, society, and the human psyche. In his book, Orixas
[4] he not only compares the "Yoruba
Deities in Africa and the New World," as the subtitle
states, he also assigns human archetypes to them. These archetypes
allow individuals to establish a direct relationship to their
Orisha *), and to find through him their rightful place in the
religious community. In this godly universe there is no one
and infallible god, under whose jurisdiction everything and
everyone must be ordered. On the contrary, the Afro-Brazilian
pantheon of the gods is dominated by a variety of clashing
voices. One example is the highest-ranking god of the Yoruba
and its Brazilian descendants, Olorun *), who hardly plays a
role in the daily lives of believers. What little one seems
to know about him is that he ordered his son, Oxala, to create
the earth and sea, and the first pair of humans. But deeply
human traits exist in this Orisha *) as well, a deity represented
from time to time as a black Jesus, and while drunk on palm
wine, Oxala nearly oversleeps his job to create the world.
The Orisha *) and their assigned qualities have complementary
characters that penetrate all areas of life and make them
rhythmic – from nutrition, education, traditional medicine
to one’s love life. That the Candomblé practice
the art of thinking in analogies and symbols is what sensually
heightens the experiencing of myths during rituals, and gives
believers concrete instructions on how to behave: "Naturally
these myths are collective ideas that possess all the strength
of tradition. At the same time, however, these are also ways
of thinking, and used to comprehend reality with. The same
applies to their adjoining rites, which depict the process
of mastering reality." [5]
Verger’s relevance rests on the fact that he understood
religious practices and cultural syncretism in the African
Diaspora as being strategies for finding one’s identity
and ways to embrace reality. In the years of the decolonization
period, he saw Afro-Brazilian society as a counter-model to
European colonialism and racism on the one side, but also
as a counter-model to the mounting, ethnic nationalism in
Africa’s newly-emancipated countries.
What particularly fascinated Pierre Fatumbi Verger about
worshipping the Orisha in the New World was its underlying
and founding, cultural concept, which refused to be determined
or reduced by geography, class and race. And by making himself
– as a European – a part of the Afro-Brazilian
lifestyle and faith that he described, Verger could effectively
test their power of assimilation and universal character.
Granted his experiences have to be seen in their historical
context. Today his enthusiasm over the "joyful melting
together" of the races, which he believed he saw in Bahia
at that time, might sound for many totally idealized. Just
the same, his photographs and studies reveal to us a model
for social integration and a system of spiritual values, which
now, in the age of ensuing holy wars waged by different fundamentalists,
can well contribute to a tolerant understanding of multiethnic
and multi-denominational societies.
Simultaneously, Verger’s work contains
an inherent critique of Brazil’s self-understanding
and self image, which nowadays gladly suppress their African
heritage. Even though circa half of the population has African
forefathers, and cultural minister Gilberto Gil intends to
legally strengthen its presence in the media – where
they form only 1% of the workforce – Afro-Brazilians
remain grossly underrepresented, where leading political and
economic positions are concerned. So perhaps Verger’s
photographs even help Brazilians to overcome the TV-soap cliché
of the dyed-blond Telenovela beauty.
Footnotes:
1. |
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In: Camera, Nr. 10, Oktober 1954 |
2. |
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Interview with Emmanuel Garrigues, in: L'Ethnographie
, N° 109, S. 171; Paris Printemps 1991 |
3. |
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Flux et reflux de la traite des nègres entre le Golfe de Bénin et Bahia de Todos os Santos, du XVIIe au XIXe siècle; Paris 1968 |
4. |
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Pierre Fatumbi Verger: Orixas. Deuses iorubás na Africa e no Novo Mondo; Bahia, 1981 |
5. |
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Roger Bastide: Le Candomblé de Bahia, S. 304; Paris 1958 |
6. |
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6. From the findings of the Brazilian NGO Sociedade
de Cultura Domabli |
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