ANOTHER IMAGE PAPUA NEW GUINEA (Signed)

David Bailey
ANOTHER IMAGE PAPUA NEW GUINEA (Signed)

Photographs: David Bailey

Publisher: Mathews Miller Dunbar & Bailey

144 pages

Year: 1975

Comments: Hardcover under dust jacket, 30,4 x 21,9 cm, b&w and color photographs. The dust jacket is in faire condition with many tears and edgewear. The book itself is in very good condition. Text in English. Signed by David Bailey.

Uncle Arty was a merchant seaman and the two things that stick in my mind about him was that he was the cleanest person I've ever known. He seemed to change his underwear three or four times a day. The other was he always seemed to be coming home from somewhere, with stories of dolphins saving people from sharks, and that there were still cannibals left in the world somewhere in the Pacific, which I took for New Guinea. New Guinea is now split into two for some strange reason, the West half now comes under Indonesia. The East, independent, with a lot of help from Australian individuals who seem to be the most helpful bunch I've ever met.

Clean Uncle Arty's stories, and the fact that the Papuans (people of Eastern New Guinea) will not dress the way they have for thousands of years in the near future, because of roads, missionaries, communications and all the usual rubbish we seem to impose everywhere we go, gave me the ambition to go there, and record just a little of the fantasy and the imagination of the way the Papuans dress. Eighty per cent of the photographs in this book are of the people exactly as I found them, in other words they did not put on their Sunday best to have their picture taken. The only sad side of their dress is that it is made mainly of bird feathers. Bird of Paradise being the prize, and a close second Lories, and Lorikeets in the latter two cases the whole bird often being spiked through and used like rows of Victorian hat pins.

I hope I have managed to capture a little more than just a social document, if I have it is an added bonus.

Maybe one day in the distant future a child might come across this book in a pile of second-hand junk, and ask, "Did people dress like that when there were still tigers in the worlds" and he might add "How lucky they were in the 20th century to have had such wonders"

David Bailey, photographer and a few other things. Born 1938 First photograph 1948. Turned Professional 1959. Still Trying 1975.

(From the dust jacket's flap)