David GILLISON
Images from the end of an ancient way of life:
Crater Mountain
16 November – 10 December 2005
Background to the photographs
All of the photos in this presentation were shot in the Crater Mountain area of Papua New Guinea in the villages of Ubaigubi, Maiva, and Herowana during 1973-75. The people of northern Crater speak Gimi, one in a group of 40 languages belonging to the Eastern Highlands Filum. Before western contact the Gimi were exclusively swidden (slash and burn) agriculturists. Following the early visits by Australian Kiaps (patrol officers) and the suppression of clan warfare in 1956-57 the Gimi abandoned their tradition of living in heavily fortified villages and moved from their high enclaves to the valley bottoms which were more easily cleared and farmed. Following an eclipse of the sun in 1962, missionaries working along the edges of the Crater region were able to convince local groups of the predictive power of Christianity and as a result were invited into the villages where they conducted mass baptisms and exposed men’s secret cults. Thus began the inevitable demise of Crater’s traditional art and culture. By a piece of serendipitous luck we arrived in the region during a last flaring of traditional religion and culture associated with the coming of independence.
Technical notes
These images were shot on Tri X film and processed with Dektol developer
in 1973 and 1974. In early 2005 I scanned a select group of negatives
with an Imacon film scanner and saved the images as TIFF files. The files
were edited in Adobe Photoshop CS on a Macintosh G4 computer and then
printed by Cone Editions Press in East Topsham, Vermont. Cone proofed
the files using profiles designed especially for their proprietary Quadtone
inks. The images were editioned using Cone’s ‘Warm Black’
profile to Hahnemühle 310gsm Hotpress paper on an Epson 9600 Inkjet
printer.
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