Photographer Carol Beckwith ’63 is the recipient of the 2010 Wings WorldQuest Women in Discovery Lifetime Achievement Award. She shares the award, which will be presented on April 15 in New York City, with her longtime creative partner Angela Fisher.
For more than three decades, the two women have documented tribal cultures across Africa, together publishing fourteen books including their acclaimed double volume African Ceremonies (1999), which won a United Nations Award for Excellence. Later this year they will publish Dinka on the pastoral tribes of Southern Sudan, and in 2011 they will bring out Africa: Spirit of Paint on the art of body painting. With the diversity of the continent’s ancient cultural traditions under threat from the homogenizing forces of globalization, the photographers are working to complete their encyclopedic study with a final volume, Twilight, planned for 2013.
Selections from their vast photo and video archive (including over 500,000 images and 400 hours of video) have been exhibited internationally at museums including the MFA, the National Geographic Museum and the Smithsonian.
View some of some of Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher’s photos: