Relations with natives: Max Dupain, Papua New Guinea, and MoMA

Abstract

In 1943, during the Pacific War, thousands of Americans and Australians descended on Papua New Guinea. They were issued with pocket-book guides on ‘relations with natives’, but were ill prepared for the encounter. One American asked how much he and other GIs could really learn about the people of the region. Australian modernist, Max Dupain, was stationed on Goodenough Island to advise on camouflage and collaborate with Americans. In addition to camouflage, he produced documentary photographs of Indigenous people and their everyday lives. Some became the New Guinea Series, a portfolio of pictures showing Melanesian villages and landscapes. It was acquired by Captain William H. Quasha of the US Army and taken to the United States. In 1946 three images from the portfolio were included in New Photographers, an exhibition staged by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. This article places Max Dupain’s Papua New Guinea photographs in two contexts: interactions between Indigenous people and Allies; and the consumption of images of Papua New Guinea by Western audiences. It speculates on how Dupain’s photographs influenced perceptions of Papua New Guinea and argues that the purpose his images served in the context of ‘New Photographers’ and MoMA’s exhibition program was to convey an aesthetics of primitivism and a poetics of the exotic transported from the outer regions of the world to the centre: the metropolis of New York.

Keywords:

• Max Dupain
• Museum of Modern Art
• World War II
• Papua New Guinea
• documentary photography

Notes on contributor

Ann Elias is Associate Professor of Critical Studies at Sydney College of the Arts, the University of Sydney. She has published extensively on art and World War II, including a 2011 book, Camouflage Australia: Art, Nature, Science and War (Sydney University Press). Her next book is titled Useless Beauty: Flowers and Australian Art published in May 2015 by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Notes

1. MoMA Press Release, 1946: ‘Exhibition Presenting “New Photographers” Opens at Museum of Modern Art’, MoMA Archive website, http://www.moma.org/learn/resources/press_archives/1940s/1946/2, accessed 14 November 2014.

2. ‘New Photographers: Check and Installation List’, MoMA Exhibition 322, MoMA Library.

3. Curtis, R.E. 21 October 1943. Letter to A.W. Welch. ‘Camouflage – General – Camouflage Organisation in New Guinea.'Series A453, item 1943/17/1510 Part 1. Canberra: National Archives of Australia.

4. MacArthur, General Douglas. 23 July 1942. ‘Camouflage Directive. Camouflage Report 1939–1945 with appendices K–N.’ AWM 81 [77 part 3], 1947. Canberra: Australian War Memorial.

5. Dupain, Max. 5 April 1944. Letter to William Dakin. R.E. Curtis Trip New Guinea, 1943. Series C1707, item 31. Sydney: National Archives of Australia.

6. Dakin, William. 1944. ‘Japanese Camouflage (as discovered in the South West Pacific Area)’. Camouflage in Pacific. Series C1707, item 65, p. 9. Sydney: National Archives of Australia.

7. ‘Data on Vivigani Mission’. 1942–1943. Operation Hackney: Goodenough Island Deception Scheme November 1942 to June 1943. AWM 54, file 585/3/1. Canberra: Australian War Memorial.