Wow, I was highly aware of the fact that he was an incredible photographer as I often had the occasion of seeing his pictures and even some books based on his work. But I was oblivious to the fact that "his team also made more than 10,000 wax cylinder recordings of native languages, recorded tribal stories and history and described their housing, clothing, food, customs and ceremonies!". Outstanding corpus of knowledge, really! It was worth every penny and then some, as we say.

Thanks a lot for sharing this precious information as well as exposing us to the Monochrome Monday Challenge. I have always strongly believed that an image contains much more than a thousand words and have always been fascinated by them, even the old ones ripped up in one corner, black & white or monochrome. as I get older, I am even more interested by them and can't come to underline how precious these documents are to me or come to evaluate the wealth of their relevance for the future generations as we borrow our lives from the ones yet to come...

Namaste :)