Maximilien Bruggmann is one of Switzerland’s greatest photographers. Through the years he has travelled around the whole world, but his greatest passion was always the Saharan desert in Africa.
While on one of his first missions (1961-1962), he spent a year with the Tuareg, together with six camels he acquired for the occasion.
Altogether he travelled seven times to Niger to visit the nomads or to look for rock engravings and paintings in the Aïr Mountains.
The exhibition covers a first phase between Niamey, the administrative capital, and Agadez, the largest city in the Aïr Massif, to the encounter with the Peul Bororo tribe and then with the Tuareg people. Among mountains and desert, lovely wide landscapes hide the legacy of a lost civilization dating back to when the Sahara was still green. Rock drawings can be found that testify to the existence of people and many extinct animals (cattle, giraffes, etc.) in this region.
Nowadays the desert is only crossed by camel caravans taking salt from Bilma, food for the camps and raw materials to be traded up north with people from the Algerian Tassili.
Aman Iman – “Water is life,” say the Tuareg. Water is scarce, costly, indispensable. The caravans, stopping at wells and temporary waterholes, go forth according to the season. While men stride with their camels across the Ténéré, the “desert of deserts”, the women stay at the camp and teach their children their primeval traditions.
