The Kenya National Museum invited its members to go on a camel safari in Northern Kenya and the camel caretakers were Samburu men. On the last day of the safari, as the sun was setting low in the sky, they performed a traditional warrior dance. The second image includes women gathered for a traditional fertility ceremony held every 7-10 years. At the end of the ceremony, more than 300 Masai women created a massive circle to be blessed by the elders of the community; my image includes a small section of this circle.
- Betty Press
Betty Press lived and worked as a photojournalist based in Nairobi, Kenya from1987 to 1995. She was the photographer for UNICEF Goodwill Ambassadors (Audrey Hepburn, Somalia in 1992 and Harry Belafonte, Rwanda, 1994). Recent assignments have taken her to Mexico, Central America, the Caribbean, and Cuba. The Christian Science Monitor publishes her work regularly, she has completed major assignments for UNICEF, UNHCR and has been published in Time, Newsweek, U.S. News and World Report, National Geographic, The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, and BBC Books. Many of her photographs have been reproduced for educational textbooks and encyclopedias. Betty’s selenium split-toned, gelatin silver photographs (producing neutral and warm tones) add distinct beauty to her images.
Betty was featured in several solo exhibitions: African Images and Proverbs; African Moments, a cross-section of current African life; The Power of the Spirit, illustrating African-rooted religious life: Yearnings, photographs from Florida; Reflections of Africa: Photographs from Cuba, Trinidad and Belize. She placed in the top international photographers in the Ernst Haas Awards Competition, awarded by the Maine Photographic Workshop, Rockport, Maine. She studied photography at the University of Michigan’s School of Art and is currently an adjunct professor of photography at the University of Mississippi, Hattieburg, Mississippi. She is represented by Panos Pictures, London; Woodfin Associates, New York; Photographic Image Gallery, Portland, Oregon; RAMOMA, Rahimatulla African Museum of Modern Art, Nariobi, Kenya; and International Visions Gallery, Washington, D.C.