Somba Family at Home
Northern Benin 2001: A Somba family at home
It must have been the perfect time of day to shoot because the blacks have detail and the whites have detail and there are lovely shades of gray. Sometimes you get lucky. I used to work in my darkroom for 8 or more hours (not counting coffee breaks) one day a week. Once I’d poured the chemicals, I wanted to use them until they were exhausted. When I’d get a photo like this one, that printed perfectly the first time, I’d be happy. It didn’t happen all that often.
Here you see the family patriarch with his grandchildren. The younger men were most likely working their fields, or had gone to market, or maybe were hunting. They could have been asleep in the house as well. The women, well, we could see them if we looked through the doorway. They were cooking or washing. The children were curious about us but didn’t ask for gifts or come up and try to touch us. They followed us and observed us with keen eyes. We were their entertainment for the day. As my guide in Uzbekistan used to say, “they’ll have gossip for a week” after our visit.
The house is festooned with fetishes: to bring good luck, to repel bad luck. The fetishes are stuck on the house walls. You can see a large one in the upper right hand corner. The color of the adobe mud was a brick-red. The thatched roof had faded to silver, the garden surrounding the house was brilliant green. It was a pretty sight.