Zanzibar

Kenya has the Lamu archipelago; Tanzania has Zanzibar, a cluster of islands at the the crossroads of cultures, with African, Indian and Arabian influences. Shot over a period of twenty years by French photographer Aline Coquelle and with a foreword by renowned Kenyan-born Italian photographer Mirella Ricciardi (author of the 1974 classic, Vanishing Africa), this is a tribute to the island’s beauty. Arguably, the purpose of Assouline coffee table books like Zanzibar is to transport the reader to an exotic reality, rather than to expose problematic postcolonial realities, and this is very much the case here. That said, from the streets of Zanzibar’s historic quarter Stone Town, to pristine white beaches, lagoons, mangroves and vanishing cultures, this book is worth its weight in visual inspiration.