Go Green

Englebert has documented the cultures of more than 30 countries in a distinguished career that began in 1957. At age 24, he drove his Vespa scooter 12,000 miles from his home in Belgium to Cape Town, South Africa. “I wanted to travel to Africa,” he explains, “and had very little money.” He hasn’t slowed down since and continues to work from his home in Allentown, PA, where he is digitizing a photographic collection of thousands of images. As a record of indigenous people, who are fast disappearing, Englebert’s images have tremendous historical value. Still, with his persistent curiosity to explore new places, he is itching to travel.

  
AUTHOR’S BIO: As a child I dreamed of becoming an explorer, of discovering lost tribes and the mysterious sources of great rivers like the Nile and Amazon. Thankfully, though after years of despair, I learned that if the world no longer needed explorers, photography offered an alternative for traveling to the secret corners of the world. I would eventually document, in pictures and words, the lives and customs of over 30 indigenous peoples in three continents.

There are no roads where I like to go, and for thousands of miles of deserts, mountains, and rain forests, I have traveled (and keep traveling) on the backs of camels and horses and on foot with porters or behind pack donkeys and llamas—like the explorer I once hoped to become.

If I was first attracted to tribal peoples by their apparent outlandishness, I quickly learned that behind their strange facades always hide the stereotypes I have met in our own society (the politician, the actor, the clown, the inventor, the lawyer, the athlete, the trader, the storyteller, the mediator, etc.). This was true even of the Amazon’s naked Yanomami Indians, a people who may have lived in isolation for 5,000 years before being discovered in the early fifties. From then on I focused my curiosity on my subjects’ humanity—on the qualities that make them so much like us.

As a travel photographer, however, half of my work also takes me to the better-known parts of the world. In fact, so many of my clients are Spanish language text book publishers that I made a second specialty of photographing for them the daily life of the Latin American middle class. My sympathy for the working children of the Southern Hemisphere also resulted in countless pictures of them.

Besides traveling around nearly 40 countries, I lived in several of them, including, in the following order: Belgium, where I was born and raised; Germany; the Congo; Canada; Colombia; and the United States. As a result, I speak and write fluently in French, English, and Spanish. I speak less well Portuguese, Dutch, and German.

My stories have been published by National Geographic (nine times, as articles and book chapters), Smithsonian, International Wildlife, Natural History, Islands, GEO (German & French), London Sunday Times, Paris Match, and other magazines.

My 17 photo books include award-winning “Wind, Sand and Silence: Travels with Africa’s Last Nomads" (Chronicle Books. San Francisco 1992), "Yanomami: Aborigines of the Rain Forest" (Time-Life Books. London 1982), and nine self-published titles.

Niger-Sahara

Niger-Wodaabe

Ethiopia

Yanomami 

For more information about Victor Englebert, see:
http://www.agpix.com/victorenglebert
http://www.aspp.com/gallery/archive13_englebert/intro.html

Contact him at Viengleb@aol.com