I Am Because We Are features 125 black and white photographs by Betty Press taken all over East and West Africa since 1987, combined with related African proverbs compiled by Annetta Miller, an American born in Tanzania.
The book highlights the importance of proverbs in educating members of African societies on how to think, how to behave, and how to have a better life. Press took these photographs with the goal of making a significant educational and artistic contribution to the appreciation and understanding of African culture and society as well as our own.
The photographs of daily life deal with knowledge, cooperation, love, beauty, friendship, hope, humor, sorrow, happiness, gratitude, dance, tradition, faith, peace, war, death, and human relationships. These are the same themes found in African proverbial language. Thus came the natural idea of coupling images with proverbs. Together they offer a powerful expression of African life and the universality of human emotions, ideas, and knowledge.
About the Author :
Betty Press, Hattiesburg, Mississippi, is an adjunct professor of photography at the University of Southern Mississippi. She has been taking photographs in Africa since 1987 and lived in Kenya for eight years. Her photographs have appeared in numerous magazines and newspapers as well as in the book, "The New Africa: Dispatches from a Changing Continent."
Review :
"It is a stunning collection of photographs taken by Betty Press while she lived and traveled in Africa. In proverbs, philosophy and poetry have a fine marriage. Such is the relationship between Press's black-and-white photographs and the proverbs that root these images in our collective mind and spirit. . . .The power of this collection is that we are able to see the engaging images of the heirs of this wisdom and hear the voices of continuity, identity, and legacy that affirm their communal spirit."
--Joanne Veal Gabbin, James Madison University
"Press's images of Africa are timeless, immediate and personally authentic. . . .The proverbs accompany, expand, and ground the pictures."
--Alison Nordstr�m, curator of photographs, George Eastman House
