Hans Silvester was born in 1938 in Lörrach, Germany. First photographs at the age of 14. After graduating from the Freiburg School of Photography in 1955, he travelled throughout Europe, and his first publication was a children's book on the life of a family of squirrels: already there was a love of nature and animals, and a concern for ecology that would never leave him.
A tireless traveler, photographer and environmental activist Hans Silvester has visited Ethiopia's Omo Valley thirty-five times. Today, he confronts his mythical “Habits of Nature” series, revealing the body paint and plant finery of very young shepherds, with images that are just as staggering: their entry into adulthood and its endemic violence. A slap in the face.
His story, even before it began, was millions of years old. Hans Silvester set off in the footsteps of Lucy and even more ancient hominids. The German photojournalist chose to leave the rare Ethiopian tracks and head for the Omo Valley (named after a long river), on the border between Kenya and Southern Sudan, which is particularly rich in paleontological deposits. A land of semi-nomadic herders, in the hollow of the Great Rift, still very difficult to access.
It was 2002, an eternity ago. What he saw then almost no longer exists. An African Arcadia, where nature is exuberantly adorned, where young shepherds, sometimes as tall as three apples, are both artists and works of art. Flower-children with naked bodies painted with fingertips, as Picasso liked to do, or with the tip of a reed.
Neither religious nor ritualistic, these tableaux vivants obey only the style and whim of their creator. They are abstractions studded with little suns and big stars, rivers meandering between sparks, masks for laughter, hidden beneath a curtain of flowers, ochre, ash-grey or clay shadows passing over their faces like the muzzle of their favorite calf.
To perfect their compositions, the kids don a little something - here a garland of flowers, nuts and twisted grasses, there a large leaf arranged with a spray of berries, or simply a tuft of fur as imperial as the Negaus' crown. These stealthy masterpieces are executed in barely a minute, the time it takes for the pigments drawn from the riverbed or the depths of the earth to dry on the skin.
