In Bagara Ed van der Elsken offers an unfiltered glimpse into life across Central Africa, capturing human resilience amid landscapes of stark beauty and intense survival. Created during his travels in 1956-57, the book encapsulates the complex humanity and vitality he encountered in remote African villages and untamed natural environments. Bagara, meaning “buffalo,” was Van der Elsken’s symbol of a primal spirit he found coursing through the people and wildlife of these regions. Inspired by the ethos of French Humanist Photography, particularly by Cartier-Bresson and Doisneau’s focus on the lives of ordinary people, Van der Elsken approached his subjects with empathy and a raw intimacy, seeking moments that transcended cultural divides.
Van der Elsken’s journey was a personal and exploratory one, motivated by an invitation from his brother-in-law, an ethnographer working in Central Africa. Over months of immersive travel through what is now the Central African Republic, Chad, Gabon, and the Republic of Congo, he photographed scenes of rural life, rituals, and the interdependent relationship between communities and the wild. His use of flash photography in village scenes—a technique rarely applied in fieldwork of this nature—created high-contrast images that pull viewers into the immediacy of each scene, highlighting expressions, gestures, and textures with clarity that feels almost cinematic.
While aligned with Humanist Photography’s celebration of shared humanity, Bagara also critiques and confronts. Van der Elsken’s lens captures both the resilience of these communities and their vulnerability within a Western perspective, layering his photos with the tension between observer and observed. The rawness of his images offers an unromanticized glimpse into African life that was both progressive and contentious for the time. Some images delve into big-game hunting scenes, an aspect that sparked ethical debates yet also reflected the integral, if complex, relationship between people and nature in the region.
Over time, reception has balanced admiration for the project’s visceral immediacy with critiques of its colonial vantage point. Exhibitions have shaped that conversation: a focused presentation, Ed van der Elsken, Bagara 1957 (Frans Hals Museum, 2004), and the retrospective Camera in Love (Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, 2017; Jeu de Paume, Paris, 2017; Fundación MAPFRE, Madrid, 2018) foregrounded its place in van der Elsken’s oeuvre, while selections in Look. Ed! (Annet Gelink Gallery, 2012) and later gallery projects prompted reassessment of its framing and ethics.
