Mau's images of Haiti, documenting Vodou practice and the Duvalier dictatorship, offer a case study on ethnographic photography and the post-colonial gaze
Trained in stage design and press photography, German photographer Leonore Mau (1916–2013) spent the 1970s and 1980s traveling with writer Hubert Fichte to research Afrodiasporic religions. Though largely unpublished, these images still present us with challenges: what does it mean to look at them today, in light of decades of discussion on artistic ethnographic photographs? As a case study, A Year and a Day focuses on Mau's pictures of Haiti taken in the 1970s during the Duvalier dictatorship. The title refers to the cosmology of Vodou, according to which souls live underwater for a year and a day before rebirth. Amid Mau's previously unpublished images, authors delve deeper into the historical background of Haiti in the 1970s, the relationship between Germany and Haiti, the photography of rituals and the ethics of both looking and taking pictures.
