New Guinea is home to more than a 1000 Stone Age tribes, each with its own language, customs and folklore which have changed little in 40,000 years. In eight trips over ten years, photographer Chris Rainier has travelled to the island to document the lives and rituals of the indigenous peoples. The result is this photographic record, showing the cultural distinctions of each tribe. Short essays accompany the photographs throughout, describing the adventures behind them. Traditions and celebrations captured include crocodile cults, ritualized costuming and tattooing, homosexual rites, sing-sing celebrations, spirit houses, rites of passage and shark calling.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Booklist
There is ethnographic documentation and then there is ethnographic documentation. Rainier is a photographer as artful as any ever born. His photos of the tribal peoples of New Guinea, especially in their ceremonial garb, are as consciously and deliberately beautiful as the photographs of poor Americans by Ben Shahn and Helen Leavitt that they often resemble in composition. Unlike the work of those artists of the Depression era and its aftermath, Rainier's photos are intensely still rather than kinetic, as if consciously posed rather than caught on the fly. Rainier's obsession with detail is as fine lined as any Pre-Raphaelite painter's and as dramatically lit (the range of grays in his monochrome images is richly broad), in those aspects recalling fellow photographer Joel Peter Witkin's pictures of gruesome medical pathology phenomena. Sometimes the masks and body piercings and paintings of his subjects are as disquieting as Witkin's imagery, but only momentarily, for Rainier visibly loves and cherishes the New Guineans and their cultures. Once seen, many of these images may haunt you forever, returning in dreams, welcomely. Ray Olson
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
One of the great photographic journals of our time,
By Chopinist (Warsaw, Poland) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Where Masks Still Dance: New Guinea (Hardcover)
This remarkable book first caught my attention at the Australian Museum in Sydney one hot summer day. I was preparing my own expedition to Papua New Guinea in order to write a book on the rarely visited island provinces. I would be doing my own photography. As I leafed through these breathtaking portraits I experienced that shiver at the base of the neck that invariably indicates one is in the presence of great art. Only later came the gut-wrenching realisation that I would never be able to achieve such consummate skill myself (even with my old Nikon F2 and all the best old lenses).Rainier has a passionate eye for composition, atmosphere and the eloquent possibilities of black and white texture. As you read the detailed and often poetic text accompanying the photographs, you will also find that Chris overcame incredible disasters in conquering this inhospitable environment to bring us these images. In the massive heat and humidity of Papua New Guinea, photographic equipment performs all sorts of horrible tricks at vital moments. Everything seems wet and clammy all the time. His canoe overturned and he lost all his valuable equipment and somehow replaced it to continue his expedition. To even get yourself into the remote areas where some were taken is an achievement in itself and then to emerge from the jungle with high art.......what can one say? These photographs cross that difficult invisible line that separates art and photography.....very few have the genuis.....Brassai, Cartier Bresson, Eugene Atget and Salgado.....yes, these are Chris Rainier's peers. The images have the immortal immobility of an ancient and inaccessible past recaptured. The quality and sheer size of the prints is superb. All this lead me to convince my publishers to put one of his pictures on the jacket of my own Papua New Guinea book and one of my own more decorative photographs on the back.......a suitable place for this photographic Salieri. Sales are better than expected. Buy his book as a tribute to a great photographic artist and in the process truly enrich your own cultural horizons. Buy it second-hand through Abe books as I see it is now out of print.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Visually stunning,
By A Customer
This review is from: Where Masks Still Dance: New Guinea (Hardcover)
This book brought back vivid and fond memories of the time I lived in Papua New Guinea in 1960 -1962. The use of black and white photography was especially effective in capturing the essense of simplicity that represents the people. If you truly wish to see human spirit at it's best, visit New Guinea. If you can't - buy this book!
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Rainier's images are transcendental.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Where Masks Still Dance: New Guinea (Hardcover)
I was first exposed to Rainer's work in Smithsonian Magazine (Oct. 97). I strongly urge anyone who has a desire to evolve toward embracing and celebrating the essential oneness of all humanity--from urban jungles to remote small-scale societies--to buy this book. As a documentary filmmaker researching shamanic rituals around the planet, I would hire him in a heartbeat to capture the beauty of the world's cultures with his otherworldly gifts of lighting, detail and penetrating the souls of the subject and the viewer. Mr. Rainer, do you shoot 16mm film? If you (or any of your representitives) read this, please contact me at pjoshua@makani.k12.hi.us. Many thanks.
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