Res


Book Description

RES 65/66 includes Francesco Pellizzi, “Editorial: RES at 35”; Remo Bodei, “A constellation of words”; Mary Weismantel, “Encounters with dragons”; Z. S. Strother, “A terrifying mimesis”; Wyatt MacGaffey, “Franchising minkisi in Loango”; Karen Overbey, “Seeing through stone”; Noam Andrews, “The space of knowledge”; and other papers.




Piksa Niugini: Diaries


Book Description

Stephen Dupont (born 1967) is an Australian photographer who has produced hauntingly beautiful images of fragile cultures and marginalized peoples since beginning his photographic career in 1989. 'Piksa Nuigini' records Dupont's journey through some of the most important cultural and historical zones in Papua New Guinea: the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville and the capital city, Port Moresby. Through images and diary entries, Dupont captures the spirit of human life on one of the world's last truly wild frontiers. This work was conducted with the support of the Robert Gardner Fellowship of Photography at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The publication consists of two slipcased volumes: 'Piksa Nuigini: Portraits' and 'Piksa Nuigini: Diaries'. The former is a collection of portraits reproduced in luscious duotone; the latter a collection of the diaries, drawings, contact sheets and documentary photographs that Dupont produced as he created his work.




Raskols


Book Description

Beautiful black-and-white portraits of Papua New Guinea's most fearsome gangsters, brigands, thieves, and carjackers posing with their arsenal of homemade guns and knives. Papua New Guinea: A land of striking beauty, mountain ranges, lush rainforests, and some of the most spectacular coastlines on earth. A land with over eight hundred unique tribes and languages. A land where crime has gotten so out of control, personal security services are the country's largest growth industry. Papua New Guinea's capital, Port Moresby, is regularly ranked among the world's five worst cities to live in by The Economist magazine. In 2004, when the photographs in Raskols were taken, the same survey ranked Port Moresby the worst city in the world. This fenced-up, razor-wired, lawless metropolis is infamous for its criminal gangs known as raskols (the indigenous Tok Pisin word for criminals). Throughout Port Moresby, dense urban settlements and a general lack of law and order have led to intertribal warfare and a seemingly endless stream of kidnappings, gang rape, carjackings, and vicious murders. That's all in addition to soaring HIV rates and massive unemployment. However, photographer Stephen Dupont is of a rare breed. He infiltrated a raskol community and documented the rough and ruthless individuals involved in Papua New Guinea's gang life. Raskols presents formal portraits of the Kips Kaboni (Scar Devils), Papua New Guinea's longest established criminal gang. Dupont set up a makeshift studio inside the Kips Kaboni safe house where he photographed his subjects and their unique handmade weapons and firearms. These mostly young, unemployed adults and teenagers orchestrate raids, carjackings, and robberies as a means of survival. The gangs control the streets. Despite the crime and violence they have unleashed on their city, some view them as modern-day Robin Hoods. With a corrupt government and police force, every day in Port Moresby is survival of the fittest. Many of these raskols initially turned to crime, violence, and anarchy in a bid to protect and provide for themselves and their communities.




Not the Way It Really Was


Book Description

"One of the most innovative monographs in recent Pacific Islands studies." --Reviews in Anthropology




Steam


Book Description

Photographs by Stephen Dupont Introduction by Mark Tully This is an extraordinary photographic record of the last steam trains in India that captures not only the fascination of the steam engine but also the sense of past which will never be revisited. It is not, however, simply a book for railway enthusiasts; these are images of great emotional power that embrace not only just the magnificence of steam but also portrays the dignity of a workforce in an industry on the verge of extinction. 70 duotone plates.




Stephen Dupont: Fucked Up Fotos


Book Description

Art as error: Stephen Dupont's photographic mishaps celebrate chance and imperfection In Fucked Up Fotos, Australian photographer Stephen Dupont (born 1967) curates a career's worth of mishaps--double-exposures, light leaks, X-ray clouding, corrupted computer files--and discovers spectacular beauty in the damage. Spanning 30 years, five continents and more than a dozen countries, from Afghanistan to Papua New Guinea, from China to Romania, these eclectic images create a veritable catalog of everything that can go wrong in a photograph, whether through user error, mechanical malfunction or deliberate sabotage. At the same time, they return us to the primal magic of photography and its ability to capture something beyond what was intended. The result is a visual mediation on chance, and a celebration of the accidental, the unpredictable and the imperfect.




A Living Language


Book Description




Piksa Niugini


Book Description

Stephen Dupont (born 1967) is an Australian photographer who has produced hauntingly beautiful images of fragile cultures and marginalized peoples since beginning his photographic career in 1989. Piksa Nuigini records Dupont's journey through some of the most important cultural and historical zones in Papua New Guinea: the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville and the capital city, Port Moresby. Through images and diary entries, Dupont captures the spirit of human life on one of the world's last truly wild frontiers. This work was conducted with the support of the Robert Gardner Fellowship of Photography at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology. The publication consists of two slipcased volumes: Piksa Nuigini: Portraits and Piksa Nuigini: Diaries. The former is a collection of portraits reproduced in luscious duotone; the latter a collection of the diaries, drawings, contact sheets and documentary photographs that Dupont produced as he created his work.




Transformations of Gender in Melanesia


Book Description

Despite the plethora of research on gender and the many projects designed to improve their status in the Pacific region, women continue to be disadvantaged and marginalised in social, economic and political spheres. How are we to understand this and what does it mean for researchers, policy-makers and development practitioners? This book examines these questions, partly by looking back but also by continuing the effort to explain and understand gender inequities in the Pacific through reference to the concept of societies in transition. The contributors discuss emerging masculinities and femininities in the Pacific in order to chart the development of these in their contexts. Exploring how contemporary Pacific identities are shaped by local contexts and traditions, they focus on how these are remade through interaction with global ideas, images and practices, including new forms of Christianity and economic transformations. Grounded in recent, original research in both the villages and towns of Melanesia, the collection engages with the study of gender in Melanesia as well as scholarship on global modernities. ‘This collection is a welcome addition to the study of gender in Melanesia … Collectively, the essays present complex, locally contextualised and regionally situated case studies of gender transformation occurring alongside, in many instances, the re-codification of hegemonic gendered norms and practices. Gender is not understood as simply code for women in this volume rather, the majority of chapters incorporate men and masculinities in their analysis of gender relations and dynamics. A highlight of the collection is the attention paid to how “the politics of tradition” (and of modernity) are expressed through morally loaded concepts of the “good” or “bad” woman or man and vice versa.’ — Kalissa Alexeyeff, University of Melbourne




Photographic Memory


Book Description

As photography became an increasingly accessible medium in the twentieth century, the popularity of the photographic album exploded, yielding a wonderful range of objects made for varying purposesto memorialize, document (officially or unofficially), promote, or educate, and sometimes simply to channel creative energy. Photographic Memory: The Album in the Age of Photography traces the rise of the album from the turn of the century to the present day, showcasing some of the most important examples in the history of the medium, as collected by the Library of Congress. The albums that comprise Photographic Memory provide an immensely personal and idiosyncratic historical perspective through the many lenses of these unique objects. From an Alaskan expedition album of Edward Sheriff Curtiss early work, to Walker Evanss extended suite of images in study for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, to a family album by Danny Lyon, this beautifully produced book provides an in-depth look at the history of photography through the handmade objects of some its most famous practitioners, much of which is previously unpublished. The book includes works by photographers and filmmakers such as F. Holland Day, Jim Goldberg, Dorothea Lange, Duane Michals, Leni Riefenstahl, and W. Eugene Smith alongside lesser-known, yet significant albums on subjects as varied as African American vaudeville, the 1915 Jerusalem locust plague, and the folkways of Spain. Each album, beautifully reproduced over numerous spreads, is accompanied by a detailed explanatory text. An insightful history of the album format is included, as well as an informative essay about caring for and restoring albums. At a time when the physical collection of photographs is becoming largely immaterial through digital means, Photographic Memory is a comprehensive illustrated history of a form of presentation that became an art form in itselfa history that has seen radical shifts in the role of handmade artists objects.