Their paintings range from abstract designs of circles, lines, dots and swirls, sometimes focused on specific body parts, to all-over patterns of flowers, zig-zags and fingerprints that form a dazzling array on the entire body. This practice stems from preparation for the hunt, but is also of a practical nature, as the decoration protects the skin from the harsh rays of the sun and insects. The riverbanks’ bounteous flora, including papyrus, flowers and wild fruit trees, incite self-expression of an infinite nature – wild nuts are stringed together to form headdresses, branches with flowers and berries are intertwined with twigs and grasses to become extravagantly baroque collars and ruffs.

The nomadic people of the Surma and Mursi tribes are self-decorators: they paint themselves daily with natural pigments and decorate their heads and bodies with plants and flowers in a tradition that seems unchanged for thousands of years. Smith, New York Times) Silvester’s photographs capture the astonishing beauty of their rituals, inviting viewers to discover new ways of seeing and appreciating the world. From painted, marked, and scarified tribesmen to tradesmen with their tools and farmers with their animals, this collection is a priceless record of a unique and increasingly fragile way of life, one threatened by conflict, tourism, and the rapidly encroaching twenty-first century.This is Silvester’s second show with Marlborough in New York and will feature photographs of the extraordinary self-decorating practices of the people of the Surma and Mursi tribes of the Omo Valley in Southern Ethiopia. This book is a beguiling portrait of its people, seen through an unusual lens-that of a simple window frame. Far from any city and with an unforgiving climate, it is nonetheless a place where traditional lifestyles meet the contemporary world. The village of Kibish lies in the lower Omo Valley on the borders of Ethiopia, Kenya, and Sudan.

My window has captured a moment in time, nothing more, nothing less, and in its endless stream of faces we can see the diversity of humankind, its customs and its religions, in a place that the old world now has to share with the new, with strangers who are here to stay.” -Hans Silvester “ My little red window has become almost a mirror image of the startling changes taking place today in Africa, where so many conflicts have arisen from the coming together of different peoples, creating a chaotic jumble of humanity that obliges vastly different cultures and languages to bond together to form some kind of community.

Natural Fashion by Hans W. Silvester