Photography “captures” a subject.

Like a bug in a jar or laboratory frog splayed open for us to gawk at. Sometimes it is propped up in faux-regal style evidencing that we had come no further than when we caged the Hottentot Venus for nineteenth-century London

freak-shows.

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Sandro Miller introduced his 2019 photographic project I am Papua New Guinea, at Expo Chicago on September 19, 2019. The renowned photographer made three trips to the Pacific Ring of Fire islands, shooting four hundred indigenous people representing a hundred tribes. The collection focusses on scarification, mudmen, wigmen, crocodile rituals, talismanic dress, and fertility rituals.

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Miller gained access to the isolated communities with the help of Australian photojournalist Torsten Blackwood. The confrontational newness of the experience to a people who have never seen a camera, nor interacted with white entitlement reads with gauche familiarity. Is it sadness? Tenderness? Indigestion?

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It doesn’t matter.

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Because you are looking at beautifully lit, thoughtfully composed objects of unknowableness posed to within an inch of Bob Mackie circa ’83. It is the face of what a hegemonic society represents, reflected in the expressions of cannibalized cannibals realizing they have been captured. Not by a sword. But by a lens.

 

I am Papua New Guinea
Expo Chicago 2019
September 19 to 22, 2019

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