the explorers journal the global adventure issue - The Explorers Club

A dani war leader exhorts his men Photographs © the president and fellows of Harvard CollegeIn the fall of 2005, I was invited to Studio7Arts inCambridge, MA, to examine a collection of imagespreserved in a dozen or more faded pale-greenbinders labeled New Guinea, 1961, Black andWhite and marked with the roll numbers of thecontact sheets they contained. Not since RobertGardner’s book, Gardens of War: Life and Deathin the New Guinea Stone Age, was published in1968 have these images—a majority of them takenby none other than Michael Clark Rockefeller inthe months before his mysterious disappearence—been allowed to tell their tales.As I reviewed each of the 350 contact sheets,I made note of those images that had particularstrength and visual integrity and soon began tounderstand elements of his extraordinary journeyinto the Dani culture—Rockefeller’s rapport andpersonal connection with the men, women, andchildren he photographed. It was clear that therehad been enough film on hand, and enough time,for Rockefeller to go beyond his official mission ofrecording the major events among the Dani—theirritual wars with rival groups—and to find the inbetweenmoments in the course of daily life.Gardner took Rockefeller on the expedition tothe Baliem Valley to serve as his soundman forthe documentary on the Dani culture that wouldbecome the celebrated film Dead Birds. Thiswas the beginning of the era of the Nikon 35mm camera—a solid instrument that would becomeknown for its bullet-deflecting capabilitiesin Vietnam—and Gardner made sure there wereplenty of them to go around. Rockefeller, Gardner,anthropologists Karl Heider and Jan Broekhuyse,novelist and naturalist Peter Matthiessen, medicalstudent Samuel Putnam, and Life magazinephotographer Eliot Elisofon all participated in“shooting” that season. Their collective portraitof the Dani—made over a 152-day period—is deepand rich. Indeed, it’s sometimes nearly impossibleto distinguish which photographer took which imagethat year. Luckily, Rockefeller took more than4,000 frames of black-and-white film, a body ofwork in which his personal style and growing fluencyin the language of the camera is evident.Some two decades ago, at Makalu Basecampin Nepal, documentary filmmaker Peter Getzelstalked with me at length about the value he placedon filming in conflict conditions. This, he believed,provided the best opportunity for observing aculture expressing itself unselfconsciously, inthe presence of outside observers. In this sense,Gardner and his team found fertile ground forcultural display among the Dani. Absorbed withwarfare, grieving losses, and celebrating victories,they allowed their observers to go about theirwork. Equally absorbed by events, the expeditionmembers, too, often wandered into the frame,showing up in production stills, allowing us tolook behind the camera and across the boundarybetween observer and observed.Rockefeller knew, or learned as he went along,that a black-and-white photograph allows for ascrutiny of natural forms that is more penetratingthan what can be achieved in color. Gone are theblues and grays of the sky with smoke and cloudsmoving through it, the deep moist greens of theforest, the screaming yellows and reds of a bird’splumage as it flies through the trees. What is leftis an abstraction of sky, forest, flight, a distilledexperience, a souvenir carefully selected fromthe continuum of life. The bodies revealed in hisimages play on our visual memory, echoing imagesfrom the long history of human art from the8,000-year-old paintings of hunters and herdsmenin Algeria’s Tassili Plateau to the ancient Greekstatues of athletes and warriors. In nakedness, wesee revealed the full gestural quality of the humanbody as it appears in those who live in close proximitywith nature. At the same time, they exposeus to new and unfamiliar ways of being. Today,some 45 years after Rockefeller’s death whilejourneying among the Asmat, his way of seeingand understanding the visual world is a gift to usthat endures.informationA limited edition portfolio of these images—collected foran exhibition and book titled Michael Rockefeller: New GuineaPhotographs, 1961—is available from the Peabody Museum andStudio7Arts in Cambridge, MA. For information on portfoliopurchase, call Kevin Bubriski, 802-442-4516biographyA Fellow of The Explorers Club, acclaimed photographer Kevin Bubriskiis the author of Portrait of Nepal (1993), Power Places of Kathmandu(1995), Pilgrimage: Looking at Ground Zero (2002) and most recently,Michael Rockefeller: New Guinea Photographs, 1961, a companionvolume to the show he curated.the explorers journal