Exhibition of Michael Rockefeller photographs

Michael Rockefeller: New Guinea Photographs, 1961
Peabody Museum of Archaeology & Ethnology, Harvard University
November 15, 2006-February 28, 2007

Boys playing at war with grass spears. Netherlands New Guinea, 1961, photo by Michael C. Rockefeller, PM 12.1.69.3.

• The exhibition is accompanied by a volume of the same name that features over 75 photographs, including all exhibition photos, an essay by curator Kevin Bubriski, and a foreword by the Harvard-Peabody New Guinea Expedition director and filmmaker, Robert Gardner.

• On March 8, 2007, at 5:30 p.m., Virginia-Lee Webb, Research Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art, will give a lecture entitled Visualizing Art and the Ancestors: Photographs of Asmat Art and Artists at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York.

From the Peabody Museum's web site:

The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology presents the first, solo show of the photographs of the late Michael Rockefeller taken in 1961 in the highlands of New Guinea. This selection of black-and-white photographs have been chosen from the 117 rolls of black-and-white film (approximately 3,500 images) taken while Rockefeller was a member of the Peabody Museum's New Guinea Expedition (1961–1963). The photographs document the life of the Dani people dwelling in the Baliem Valley, high in the mountains of New Guinea, today Irian Jaya, Indonesia. In addition to their rich documentary content, these photographs reveal much about the sensibility behind the camera. Many of the photographs in the exhibition are vintage prints made in the early nineteen sixties. A few of the photographs were published in the volume about the expedition Gardens of War (Random House, 1968). Most have never before been published or publicly displayed.