The Africa Portfolios

BIO

Passion, Tuareg Woman, (c) 2009
The Sahara Desert, Mali
30" x 25" Platinum Print on Rag

Between 1986 and 2012, American artist Elisabeth Sunday found her muse among indigenous people, mainly in Africa. Africa is a place of origins, devastating beauty, great troubles and unyielding expressions of life. Elisabeth traveled alone and lived among various original peoples who amidst a changing world, have clung tenaciously to traditional ways of life. From the hunter-gatherers dwelling in the primeval forests of the Congo Basin, to the nomadic tribes inhabiting the vast stretches of the Sahara Desert, Sunday's photographs reveal an interplay of invisible forces that connect her subjects with the world of nature. Utilizing a flexible mirror of her own design, Sunday photographs reflections that blend and dissolve the boundaries between her figures and their environment. Sunday's images express an intimacy with a corresponding strength derived from that relationship.

Elisabeth Sunday is the progenitor of "Field Mirror Photography" and first began taking mirrors into the field in 1983. Her work is analogue (shot with film cameras) and therefore have no digital special effects. She designs large mirrors and has them built to specifications that yield unique visual effects. The mirror acts as a second lens, in this two lens system with marvelous and surprising results. Elisabeth is able to play with shapes outside of the normal plain of the camera lens to create images that are truly transcendent of the subject.

Her work has been widely exhibited in the United States and Europe and is in many museum collections including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Houston Art Museum, The Cleveland Museum of Art, the Corcoran Art Gallery, the Getty Museum, and many more. 

Nazraeli Press published her first monograph "Grace" in 2012. It is currently sold out.

She is currently living in Normandy, France.