Text by Wilhelm Klein.
Preface by Wade Davis.
A unique documentation of isolated and vanishing cultures around the world.
With a traveling photographic studio setup of their own invention and a generous supply of patience and determination, this photographer-and-writer team traversed the globe in search of the last cultures to live apart from an increasingly materialistic world. Throughout Africa and Southeast Asia, they found areas that have remained largely unaffected by the globalizing technological changes of our age.
The astounding and rapid advances in information technology have transformed the values, lifestyles, and self-perceptions of the majority of people in the developed world. Günter Pfannmüller and Wilhelm Klein searched for what they describe as a form of dignity that will soon be extinct. What they found are simple but profoundly enlightened ways of life that are expressed in elaborate costume, ritual, and material culture.
Pfannmüller and Klein believe that taking portraits in a studio setting is the best way to isolate, and thereby identify and record, the remaining elements of the individual and the human lost to modern culture. Their images unveil a resonant dignity in the faces, stances, and dress of people who have little self-consciousness but complete self-possession.
Günter Pfannmüller is a photographer based in Frankfurt, Germany. Wilhelm Klein, a writer and publisher specializing in travel literature, lives in Bangkok, Thailand. They are the co-authors of Burma and Burma the Golden.
