- Mursi Woman
Ethiopia, 2013
A Mursi woman kneels near a hut and poses for my friend, Elizabeth. I grab a shot myself. I don’t always need to have the subject’s eyes staring at me. I like to get side light when possible. Notice how her skin gleams and she has a rim of light around her arms and shoulders.
The woman is clever. She has looped a woven band through a series of bracelets and then tied that to her head. She wears a large lip plate and carries a beautiful beaded basket. Oh, why didn’t I ask to buy that basket?
Mursi Woman with Lip Plate Up Close
The lip plates are made of wood or pottery. The girls start out with a small cut under their lip and the lip is stretched through a series of ever increasing lip plates as well as the manual stretching done by the women themselves. Our group included a dentist and she was impressed with the surgery the Mursi do on the girls as it is necessary to keep the blood supply to the lip to keep the tissue healthy.