Barbra Streisand fell in love with tribal style while filming the long-forgotten 1972 drama Up the Sandbox on location in Kenya
Up the Sandbox requires Barbra Streisand’s character to travel to Africa, so that’s what the cast and crew did. (MGM back lot be damned!) Members of Kenya’s Samburu tribe appear in the movie, and the actress made fast friends—especially with the women. “I had the greatest outfits…jewelry made out of telephone wire, little beads,” she later said. “We’d set up a portrait sitting on the fly,” Steve Schapiro recalls in Barbra (Taschen, 336 pages, $69.99). Sandbox ranks as one of Streisand’s lowest-grossing, most obscure films. Schapiro’s self-described “fashion pictures,” however, are evergreen.
(Photograph by Steve Schapiro courtesy of Heather James Fine Art)