above: Adelaide de Menil with village children Highlands, Papua New Guinea, 1973
Photo: Herbert Loebel
cover: Teenage boy, Highlands, Papua New Guinea, 1973
December 6–30, 2022
Tambaran Gallery, 5 East 82nd Street, New York
Adelaide de Menil: Portraits from Papua New Guinea, 1969–1973, is co-presented by Tambaran Gallery and the Rock Foundation, in celebration of the 100th birthday of Edmund Carpenter.
This exhibition and publication is part of a series of events honoring his vast legacy in anthropology, archaeology, and literature.
Rock Foundation was created by Edmund Carpenter and Adelaide de Menil in 1976. The Foundation is grateful to Maureen Zarember for her dedication and kindness to Ted and Adelaide over the course of many years.
Rock Foundation
Board of Directors
Adelaide de Menil, President
Peter de Roos, Vice President
Victoria de Menil, Secretary
Aziz Friedrich, Treasurer
James Bradley, Director
Staff
Sean Mooney, Managing Director
George Hamell, Emeritus Curator
Jamie Jacobs (Seneca), Curator
Malcolm Harris, Archivist
Tambaran Gallery Maureen Zarember, Director Zoe Zarember, Director
Photography © Adelaide de Menil / Rock Foundation, 2022 Photography by Herbert Loebel where noted
Publication © Rock Foundation, 2022
All rights reserved
In 1969, anthropologist Edmund (“Ted”) Carpenter was hired by the Australian government to conduct a study on the impact of electronic media upon the indigenous Biami populations of Papua New Guinea, which at the time was an Australian colony. Carpenter, a pioneer of the field of new media theory along with his friend Marshall McLuhan, had just completed a decade leading the groundbreaking Visual Anthropology department at California State University at Northridge, training a generation of students of anthropology in the use of music, film, radio and other media. In Papua, he decided to locate the most remote communities in the Highlands and along the Sepik River, and to interact with them using cameras, film, sound recorders, mirrors and other apparatus, knowing
that these would likely be unknown to them, and to record their responses. Many of the people had never seen their own image or heard their own voices played back to them. To help him document the project, Carpenter brought with him the best photographer he knew, Adelaide de Menil.
Adelaide was not only an accomplished commercial photographer for Vogue and other magazines, but also a licensed airplane pilot. She launched her photography career in 1961, when she began documenting the lively New York art scene, by attending gallery and museum exhibition openings. Her parents, the art collectors Jean and Dominique de Menil, and her sister, Christophe, provided her access to many of the artists who made up the
avant-garde of the visual and performing arts in America and Europe. Soon, however, Adelaide turned her attention to indigenous cultures, and the vast landscapes of the Pacific Northwest. She spent much of 1966 through 1968 traveling across coastal Alaska and British Columbia, at the invitation of Haida artist Bill Reid, photographing the remnants of tribal totems that were descending into the natural environment from deterioration and age. Adelaide’s powerful images formed the basis of her book Out of the Silence, (1971), with texts by Bill Reid, which remains one of the great documents of Pacific Northwest Coast philosophy.
For the project in Papua New Guinea, Adelaide and Ted produced many hours of film footage, which is today in the Smithsonian Institution’s Anthropology Film Archive, which Carpenter helped create. These rare films document a way of life which had remained unchanged for centuries, but which was
feared to be under pressure within a short time. The impetus for the invitation from the Australian government came from the fact that Australia was planning to grant sovereignty to Papua, which became an independent Commonwealth in 1975.
Having developed agriculture in the Highlands since at least 7000 B.C., Papua New Guinea is one of the most culturally diverse places in the world, with over 800 spoken indigenous languages and roughly 1000 ethnic groups. For Carpenter — who had served in WWII as a Marines officer in the South Pacific, and who had lived in the arctic for two years in the 1950s with an Inuit family — the opportunity to work with unchanged ancient cultures was of great fascination. The focus on their interaction with media was especially relevant to Carpenter’s work, but he ultimately felt that the results of Australia’s efforts would be to dilute the indigenous cultures, and he left the fieldwork
incomplete. Instead, he wrote the book Oh What A Blow That Phantom Gave Me! (1973), his tour-deforce manifesto of observations on human language as transformed by electronic media. The book reads as if it was written forty years later, anticipating the transformative computer-driven and web-induced cultural milieu we inhabit today.
While Ted’s anthropological publications in print, film and teaching are well appreciated, it was Adelaide’s photography and cinematography which provided the visual documentation Carpenter needed. The couple worked side by side gathering hundreds of hours of field recordings, but Adelaide contributed an additional layer of skill and sensitivity to Ted’s work. Her photography is unusual compared to most anthropological records, as it comes from an artist deeply immersed in an environment that valued aesthetics and creativity, and with concern for human rights and conditions.
Consistent with Adelaide’s photography from other locations, her approach in Papua was to create intimate human portraits of the indigenous villagers, not merely as subjects, but as the beautiful individuals and families she encountered. Her subjects appear dignified, expressive, and joyful. As elsewhere, she often paid especial attention to children. In this exhibition, we celebrate many of these images for the first time, as an independent body of work.
Adelaide and Ted’s time together in Papua was the first of many fruitful collaborations, but it was also a love story: the two remained life partners from 1968 until Ted’s passing in 2011. Papua was simultaneously intense fieldwork and honeymoon. The stunning beauty in many of Adelaide’s portraits from Papua seem to radiate with compassionate love; they glow with life, warmth and tenderness. This is not mere anthropology, it is profound happiness and joy.
Adelaide returned with Ted to Papua New Guinea once more in 1973, and a number of the portraits from the series date to this second visit. They were accompanied this time by photographer Herbert Loebel and his wife Alice, who had befriended Adelaide in 1960. Herbert mentored Adelaide in photography technique and the two worked together on commercial projects, and became lifelong friends. By the mid-1970s, Papua was becoming something of a photographer’s haven, in part due to Irving Penn’s portable studio series he made in Papua in 1970, under the guidance of Ted Carpenter. Penn’s portraits of Papuans, however, are romanticized and artificial, looking more like “Irving Penn-style” abstractions than like the living human beings Adelaide’s portraits convey.
projects, and founded the Rock Foundation in 1976, to preserve and protect a vast collection of Haudenosaunee (mostly Seneca) culture. Today, Rock Foundation serves to further the legacies of the founders and to honor their visions. Rock expands on this mission by actively collaborating with the indigenous descendants of the cultures whose creativity they studied and admired, through exhibitions, publications and cultural diplomacy.
This year, 2022, is Edmund Carpenter’s centennial anniversary, and we celebrate him, and his wife Adelaide de Menil, with this special presentation of photographs created because of their partnership.
Together, Adelaide and Ted created one of the world’s finest collections of indigenous arts, fostered dozens of archeological and creative
— Sean Mooney Managing Director, Rock FoundationGuinea, 1969
It was noted by Carpenter that people unfamiliar with operating a camera or telescope did not naturally have the capacity to close one eye at a time. People introduced to the camera soon picked up the habit, forming something of a game with each other.
Highlands villager with still camera Highlands, Papua New Guinea, 1969
Not only did Carpenter and de Menil take photos and recordings of Papuan villagers, they also gave them cameras to operate themselves.
Villagers waiting for “movie night” Highlands, Papua New Guinea, 1969
The Australian government had attempted to introduce the Biami to moving picture shows, without much success. Carpenter experimented with presentations of films, but showed footage that de Menil had filmed of the villagers themselves. These shows were tremendously popular.
Village chief with self-portrait photo in headdress Highlands, Papua New Guinea, 1969
Carpenter noted that this elder attached the portrait taken of him into his regalia, and when others noticed this, they spoke to his portrait image, not directly to his face.
