Carlo Mari: Passage through Dar

In 2018, Carlo Mari, while working with his camera on a story about fishing, boats, nets, and fishermen from all over the coast of East Africa, from North Kenya to Mozambique, decided: "I will make a book on the Dar Es Salaam fish market that I know as my own pockets! A book in the book, a parenthesis of my great story about fishing on the East African coast." Thus was born Passage through Dar.

Carlo Mari: Passage through Dar presents those images taken by the Italian photographer in the Dar Es Salaam fish market; stunning photographs that show the beauty and genuineness of people who live this place every day, in one of the most spectacular markets in the world.

Carlo Mari is a photographer of reportage and advertising. He has travelled the world above and below the seas, with his camera around his neck, always to tell his story. Between the '80s and '90s, he published services and covers in the most prestigious Italian and foreign sea magazines. Afterwards, and for a long time, he documented the wild life of East Africa and was a correspondent for "The Harvill Press" in London. From this collaboration, two important volumes were produced: The Great Migration and Pink Africa. In Africa, he now lives several months a year in close contact with unspoiled nature and tribal peoples. As a portraitist, for years he has been documenting the beauty—not only the exterior one—of many people at risk of extinction.

Carlo Mari has to his credit many photographic books published all over the world, some concerning the life of seabed, others of East Africa, between Kenya and Tanzania, and others more focused on the artistic nude and advertising glamour, such as Animal Man, published in Paris by Edition de La Martinière in 2000. My Africa, one of his most important creations, became part of the 2004 best-seller list in Germany. With Leonardo International, he realised in 2009 a book on Pope Benedict XVI on his visit to Montecassino Abbey. Connoisseurs know him for his refined FineArt prints in very limited editions, present in many private collections all over the world. In the last three years, the call of the sea has been so strong as to bring him back in search of ancient sensations. Sea and Africa: these are the ingredients to which he is dedicating himself to telling the story of life, fishing techniques, and traditions of fishermen in East Africa.