Photo by Yumna Al-Arashi, as published in Huffington Post. Last week’s Huffpost Culture featured a wonderful article about photographer Yumna Al-Arashi’s quest to document the origins of her grandmother’s time-honored tradition of facial tattoos. It turns out there are several motives behind the lines, dots, and symbols that adorn the faces of the women whose …
Photo by Hans Silvester (from Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa). Several years ago, I happened upon a wonderful book by photographer Hans Silvester titled Natural Fashion: Tribal Decoration from Africa. The photos are gasp-inducing! I ran to my computer and ordered several copies as gifts that Christmas. The book features breathtaking photographs of the nomadic …
At their most basic level, jagua and henna are inks. For some reason, the subject keeps coming up in conversations with unlikely people, so these exchanges have served to remind me of a section in my book, Jagua: A Journey into Body Art from the Amazon, which speaks to ink having stemmed from a desire …