The People of Kau (1976, signed first edition)

Signed and dedicated by Leni Riefenstahl

Author

Publisher

Printing Details

First edition. Large hardback in dustwrapper. 31.5 × 24cm, 224pp.

Signed and dedicated by Leni Riefenstahl to the half-title page. The inscription is in German and to Herrn Johannes Schroeder, dated 1978.

From the dustwrapper, "Leni Riefenstahl, one of the most outstanding film directors and documentary photographers of our time, here presents us with a volume of text and pictures whose unique documentary and artistic merits and contribution to cultural history make it a worthy successor to her book The Last of the Nuba which deals with the Mesakin Nuba. Although the Nuba of Kau—anthropologists call them the 'South East Nuba'—live little more than 100 miles from the gentle and peace-loving Mesakin, they speak a different language and observe different customs and conventions. A wild and passionate people, they are diametrically opposed to the Mesakin in character and temperament. Their knife-fights, dances of love and elaborately painted faces and bodies, which resemble 'living Picassos', are unequalled by any surviving primitive race on earth. Leni Riefenstahl does not claim to have captured their entire way of life in this book. She has concentrated on photographing what distinguishes the South East Nuba from other tribes of her acquaintance.

Of the sixteen sweltering weeks she spent with the Nuba of Kau in 1975, Leni Riefenstahl says: 'It was a time of almost intolerable hardship and exertion... But for my deep-seated urge to pursue the strange and the beautiful, heedless of time, danger and discomfort, these pictures would never have been taken.' Leni Riefenstahl's unforgettable photographic impressions of the life of the People of Kau bear final witness to a primitive tribe which is menaced by the advance of industrial civilization and slowly subsiding into the mists of time."

Condition

The book itself is in very good condition, with clean pages (bar one small mark to the terminal blank) and secure binding. Leni Riefenstahl's signature and dedication is clear. The dustwrapper is good, it has been price-clipped and is rubbed along the top edge, at the head of the spine and has some minor surface abrasion. One small tear to the spine over the N of Riefenstahl.

ISBN

2165600