A friend sent me a copy of this photo quoting source, that featured David Chudy (my father). He asked if I knew about it.
The photo he referred to was shot by Ilo Battigelli (Ilo the Pirate) in 1957 and is in the Kariba archive, at the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford,
I said that I did not know the photo. And then commented that I had some reservations about it.
It is hard to identify the artist from that angle. Also it looked staged but mostly because it seemed out of character. At that stage I had never known David Chudy to own, let alone wear a pith helmet. Not that he did not have anything to do with Kariba but I was suspected that the photo was mislabeled. Two of his paintings ( 1 & 2) were of its construction. And there is this old video and this photo.
Only after returning to Zimbabwe after the passing of my sister Naomi (an absence of 2.5 decades), was I able to take a fresh perspective on it,
First was the big surprise to find the said photo (below) framed and signed in the house. Second was witnessing number of archival photos I was later to scan and recover – showing that pith helmets were commonplace and indeed David Chudy wore one quite often in the 40’s in Northern Rhodesia.
Rhodesian Study Circle says this about Ilo:
Ilo Alexander Battigelli (1922-2009) was an Italian draftsman who gained his nickname from photographing important moments in the history of the Saudi oil industry while working in Ras Tanura Refinery. Workers in Aramco changed his name and started calling him “Ilo the Pirate” because he had his studio on the beach.
He left Aramco in 1954 and was exhibiting and photographing in the United States, often in pirate garb. After returning to Italy to be with his ill mother, he moved to Southern Rhodesia in 1957 to photograph the construction of the giant Kariba Dam for its Italian contractor. He then opened a studio in Salisbury and continued to shoot studies of people and places. In 2000, he retired with his wife Pauline to San Daniele del Friuli, Italy.
In 1980, the National Gallery of Zimbabwe held an exhibition titled Ilo the Pirate: A Retrospective Exhibition Spanning Ilo Battigelli’s Fifty Years in Photography.
