There she is, divorced from any context but one: She is a Herero woman in Hereroland, or what is called Namibia.

It is 2012 in the photograph, but her costume refers to a war that killed three-quarters of Hereros one hundred and ten years ago. It started when Hereros rose up against their German colonizers to regain their own rule, starting with a rebellion on January 14, 1904. The German campaign in Southwest Africa was, writes one scholar, "the first genocide of the twentieth century."

The only individual name we know in this situation is the name of the photographer, Jim Naughten, who is based in London. Naughten has taken pictures of reenactors of all kinds, and he deliberately submerges their individuality into their historical, geographical, and cultural references.

It doesn't entirely work—this woman is still distinctly herself: those eyes, that look of secret joy that has nothing to do with this costume. But Naughten set her against a backdrop that seems to burn itself off into nothing in the distance. It's what some consider the oldest desert in the world, stretching back into infinite time.

Why the pink dress and the hat shaped like cow horns? First, the horns: The abuse of the Herero cattle population during German rule was among the reasons they rebelled.

The dress is in the style of early 20th-century German women. Herero women wearing this costume stream across the desert, marching under the sun.

Even though nothing new is happening besides the reenactment of passed-down memories, the photographs are flashy and full of visual conflict presented anew to a viewer. The pictures reactivate the past for an audience. Naughten's camera highlights the simple but often forgotten fact that different people live differently with the past. As Obama said in his Trayvon Martin speech, some Americans would prefer to see present crimes divorced from past ones.

When a Herero man killed a German soldier, he would remove the German's uniform and put it on, wearing it proudly. That's how the dressing tradition began. The Germans killed the vast majority of the Hereros, then went on to dominate the 20th century. No German today wears a Herero costume. Meanwhile, the Hereros still gaze toward Germany.