Images of Congo

Images of Congobrings to light New York artist Anne Eisner who lived in the former Belgian Congo during the 1940s and 1950s. Her passion for maverick field anthropologist Patrick Putnam brought her to the place he founded Camp Putnam at the edge of the Ituri forest. Her commitment to the people there caused her to stay nine years. An eccentric in the colonial context, she spent extended periods of time in pygmy camps, transcribing legends, writing ethnographic notes and bringing up three orphaned pygmy babies. After Putnam destroyed almost everything he had built before he died in 1953, Eisner salvaged the camp, now named Epulu, and published a ghostwritten autobiography that both described and distorted her experiences in the forest.