Matthias Ziegler’s photographs of Africa focus attention on a continent that many associate only with hunger, AIDS, and civil war. He brings different images back from his journeys, images beyond the clichés of the genre of photojournalism. They are poetically sensuous works, observing people with empathy and sensitively sketching them. His goal is to capture the beauty and dignity of human beings, to provide inside views of their lives, and also to record the humorously bizarre. Thus his photographs seem at first glance to lack political connotations, even when those who commission them—aid organizations and renowned magazines—are politically motivated.

Matthias Ziegler takes us into metropolises and leads us on a search for the origins of humankind, into remote corners of the continent. […] Thus we meet the Hadzabe’e, a small ethnic group in Tanzania who are at risk of dying out. Unwarlike, without fixed abodes or hierarchy, and still lighting fires with sticks, their values, such as not permitting ownership and asserting the equality of men and women, are in keeping with Western social utopias. They are recorded here in imaginative portraits (5, 9) or while hunting and gathering, the oldest form of culture, using extremely poisonous arrows (12a) and bows (27) or searching for honey (28).

[…] Naturally, every photograph also says something about the perceiver: about the photographer and his own life. In fascinating artist’s books printed on handmade paper, bound in leather using thread, he creates travel diaries in the finest sense; Matthias Ziegler has collected his experiences and impressions in photographs and notes over the years.

Distinct from other photographs we know of Africa—such as Olivier Föllmi’s colorful photographs of African landscapes; Nick Brandt’s animal worlds, his famous elephants, lions, and giraffes; Jean-Baptiste Huynh’s aesthetic portraits and still lives; or Isabel Munoz’s Ethiopia series showing impression body painting—Matthias Ziegler’s have their own idiom; they are individual and touching, in part because he combines a good eye for people with sympathy for them.