Minor Ekpe Masquerade with Mango Leaves, Calabar South, Nigeria, 2005

Aperture is pleased to release a special limited-edition photograph by Phyllis Galembo from the reissue of her book, Maske. 

Galembo has documented cultural and religious traditions in Africa and among the African Diaspora for over two decades. Traveling widely throughout western and central Africa and regularly to Haiti, Galembo photographs participants in masquerade events—traditional African ceremonies and contemporary costume parties and carnivals—who use costumes, body paint, and masks to create mythic characters. Sometimes entertaining and humorous, often dark and frightening, her portraits document and describe the transformative power of the mask.

C-Print on Fuji Crystal Archival Paper
Edition of 25 and 2 Artist’s Proofs
Paper Size: 15 x 15 inches
Image Size: 14 x 14 inches
Signed and numbered by the artist

Phyllis Galembo (b. 1952, New York City) has been a professor in the Fine Arts Department of SUNY Albany since 1978. Galembo has made over twenty trips to sites of ritual masquerade in Africa and the Caribbean, capturing cultural performances with a subterranean political edge. Her photographs have been exhibited by museums, including the American Museum of Natural History, New York; George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York; Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C.; and Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography. In 1994, Galembo received a Senior Fulbright Research Award to photograph Kings, Chiefs, and Women of Power: Images from Nigeria. In 2001 she received a Hasselblad Masters Award as well as an Artist’s Fellowship from the New York Foundation for the Arts. She lives and works in New York City.