Michael Hoppen Gallery
3 Jubilee Place
London
+44 (0)20 7352 3649
Mirella Ricciardi
February 22-April 5, 2008

Mirella Ricciardi’s African pictures have the integrity of spontaneous, intuitive documents made with the deep love of someone who knew and understood their subject. There is nothing voyeuristic here, no sense of exploitation of the exotic, rather a sense of Mirella’s tender, familial engagement, and her considerable respect for the inherent nobility of what was before her lens.

The small selection of portraits made in 1968 and now on exhibition — printed in platinum in a powerful large format — represents just one facet of a wide-ranging reportage that was published nearly forty years ago as a book, aptly titled Vanishing Africa. The photographer had close connections with Kenya and a privileged access to the peoples of the Turkana and Masai tribes. She recognised the vulnerability of the land, the people and the animals suspended together in a state of grace that was magical, but doomed. Mirella knew she must fulfil her unique opportunity to make a record of this fugitive moment and she did so with energy and passion. By the turn of the millennium her book seemed long forgotten and her pictures were too little known. Four decades on from their making, and with our painful awareness of the obliteration of the way of life that they depict, these images take on an extra layer of poignancy as elegies for a lost Eden and as fine metaphors for all that we are in danger of destroying on our planet.

Born in Kenya, then still a colony of British East Africa, to an Italian father and a French mother, Mirella Ricciardi grew up on the shores of Lake Naivasha in a household which was both sophisticated and wild. She was married at twenty-five to the Italian adventurer Lorenzo Ricciardi, who swept her off her feet and hired her as the photographer on the film he was making in East Africa. She bore him two children, both girls. Marina, their eldest daughter, died of cancer at the age of thirty-six.

Mirella's first book, Vanishing Africa, was published in 1971. An international bestseller, it made her reputation; one reviewer wrote that it was 'a masterpiece of photographic excellence'. She has since published four other photographic books - Vanishing Amazon, African Saga, African Rainbow and most recently, African Visions.

Having finally severed her umbilical tie to the African continent, she now lives for part of the year on an anonymous London street in the shadow of the Chelsea Football Club stadium in Fulham. Her nondescript terraced house has been turned into an African haven filled with light, African artefacts and rambling plants. The pair of black buffalo horns, which for years hung above the front door, were removed when Lorenzo moved back to Italy. They now commute between their two homes.

Mirella Ricciardi worked on instinct. These pictures reveal the intelligence and sensitivity of that instinct.

Mirella Ricciardi, © Mirella Ricciardi.