Photographs from the Armand Denis Expedition in Ecuador

GUID

https://n2t.net/ark:/65665/sv4d65f88c0-f50e-41a4-bafc-85255b68af84

Place

Ecuador

Provenance

Gift of Alfred Tamarin, 1979.

Culture

Tsáchila (Colorado)

Summary

This collection includes 28 transparencies and four photographs taken during Armand and Michaela Denis's expedition circa 1948 among the Tsáchila in Ecuador.

Biographical / Historical

Armand Georges Denis (1896-1971) was born in Brussels, Belgium. He became interested in nature and travel as a child. He studied chemistry at Oxford before working at the Royal Aircraft Establishment. He moved to the United States and invented a volume control system for radios for which he earned a significant amount money. He began working in film and traveled to Bali in 1928 to make "Goona Goona." The film brought attention and opportunities to Denis to direct movies and record sound material. He worked on documentaries in Africa, India, and Burma. Denis met and married his second wife, Michaela Holdsworth, in 1948. The pair worked on "King Solomon's Mines" to help finance their independent projects before creating the film "Below the Sahara," which appeared on BBC. The quality of the filmmaking, combined with Denis' heavy accent and Michaela's enthusiasm and glamorous appeal, made them fixtures on BBC during the 1950s and early 1960s, revolutionizing wildlife documentaries on television. In January 1963, Armand Denis was the first editor of Animals magazine, which later became BBC Wildlife. He also published an autobiography. The couple made their home in Nairobi, Kenya. Denis died from Parkinson's disease in 1971. Michaela Holdsworth (1914-2003) was born in London. She was raised by her Russian mother and grandmother after her father, an archaeologist, was killed during WWI. She received a scholarship and trained as a fashion designer in Paris. She moved to the United States and began an affair with Armand Denis, whom she later married in a ceremony in Bolivia. While working on "King Solomon's Mines, Holdsworth acted as Deborah Kerr's double. In 1954, the couple produced a pioneering and successful TV program, "Filming Wild Animals" for the BBC where the two would be filmed getting as close to animals as possible, in a style later much parodied. Typically, there would be a trademark moment for Michaela to apply lipstick or comb her hair; she once commented that she could not possibly get into the water with crocodiles until she had put on her eyebrow pencil. Holdsworth wrote multiple books including "Leopard in My Lap" and "Ride on a Rhino." A few years after Armand passed, she married her lawyer, Sir William O'Brien Lindsay, the former Chief Justice of the Sudan, who died in his sleep three months later. Holdsworth died in Nairobi in 2003, aged 88.

Extent

28 Photographic transparencies

4 Photographic prints

4 Copy negatives

Date

Circa 1948

Archival Repository

National Museum of the American Indian

Identifier

NMAI.AC.221

Type

Collection descriptions

Archival materials

Photographic transparencies

Photographic prints

Copy negatives

Citation

Identification of specific item; Date (if known); Photographs from the Armand Denis Expedition in Ecuador, image #, NMAI.AC.221; National Museum of the American Indian Archives Center, Smithsonian Institution.

Arrangement

Arranged by catalog number.

Processing Information

Collection record written by Mattie Lewis, Archives Technician in 2025.

Rights

Permission to publish materials from the collection must be requested from National Museum of the American Indian Archives Center. Please submit a written request to nmaiphotos@si.edu. For personal or classroom use, users are invited to download, print, photocopy, and distribute the images that are available online without prior written permission, provided that the files are not modified in any way, the Smithsonian Institution copyright notice (where applicable) is included, and the source of the image is identified as the National Museum of the American Indian. For more information please see the Smithsonian's Terms of Use and NMAI Archive Center's Digital Image request website.

Scope and Contents

This collection contains 28 transparencies, four black and white photographs, and four copy negatives taken during Armand and Michaela Denis' expedition to Ecuador. Images were taking while filming a documentary. The transparencies depict the couple meeting people from the Tsáchila (Colorado) tribe and people posed in traditional body pain and clothing. The photographs depict Michaela Denis holding an aardvark during a separate expedition to Africa. Transparency numbers Tnonobject 2-29. Image numbers P28733 - P28736. Negative numbers N42099 - N42102.

Restrictions

Access to NMAI Archives Center collections is by appointment only, Monday - Friday, 9:30 am - 4:30 pm. Please contact the archives to make an appointment (phone: 301-238-1400, email: nmaiarchives@si.edu).

Record ID

ebl-1758139500580-1758139500689-0