Sometime a Clear Light; A Photographer's Journey though Alaska, Nigeria, and Life - E-book - ePub

In Sometime a Clear Light: A Photographer's Journey Through Alaska, Nigeria, and Life,  Aylette Jenness reflects on living with her husband and two small children in a tiny Yu'pik village in Alaska in the early 1960s, and on the time they spent in Africa from 1966 to 1969, three of the  most terrible years of the Nigerian Civil War (the Nigerian-Biafran War). It was a tumultuous  time for Aylette, as well, as she split from her husband, an anthropologist, who had been sent to  Nigeria to study the resettlement driven by the construction of the Kainji Dam.  The memoir follows her evolution as a single mother, an author of eleven children's books on diverse cultural groups, and as a self-taught photographer.
Her photographs of the Fulani, Sarkawa, Kamberi, and Hausa people of Yelwa, Kainji, and Ibadan, which capture a lost way of life, are now are housed in the "Aylette Jenness Collection" at the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art.  In Sometime a Clear Light, Jenness, now 87, looks back at her own life to find insight into the past as she is losing her physical sight due to macular degeneration.