The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology is pleased to announce the selection of the 2010 Robert Gardner Fellow in Photography. Following an international search, the Gardner Fellowship committee awarded the Fellowship to Stephen Dupont, a prize-winning Australian photographer whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Time, and Rolling Stone, among other publications. Dupont will be working on a project entitled Guns and Arrows: The Detribalization of Papua New Guinea.
Over the past six years, Dupont has traveled to Papua New Guinea, photographically documenting its changing face and the powerful impact of globalization on the fabric of its traditional Melanesian society. Guns and Arrows, the proposed project, will continue this work. From the recasting of tribal society into an urban proletariat and the effects of violence and lawlessness in Port Moresby to the westernization of traditional society in the Highlands, it will be an in-depth study of cultural erosion as well as a celebration of an ancient people. He plans to use 35mm, 6×6, panoramic, and Polaroid formats for documentary street photography, landscapes, and portraiture; weaving single images, contact sheets, composites, and video grabs into multiple forms: a traditional exhibition at the Peabody Museum, a book with the Peabody Museum Press, and an interactive web presentation.
“I think these modern approaches are needed to fully exploit photography’s still-untapped power to move, motivate, and change the world,” says Dupont. The project will be “a reflection and a meditation on a unique place, and it may also be seen as a warning for other, seemingly more ‘secure’ cultures.”
Prof. William L. Fash, William and Muriel Seabury Howells Director of the Peabody Museum, noted that Dupont’s work echoes that of famed photographer-filmmaker Robert Gardner, who funds the Fellowship. “Robert Gardner shot his most provocative film ‘Dead Birds’ about the Dani people and their then-traditional hunter-gatherer culture in New Guinea, and it has inspired visual anthropologists ever since,” he said. “Stephen Dupont’s courageous portraits of the people of Papua New Guinea share not only a geographical connection with Gardner’s work, but also a commitment to capturing scenes from within a culture, scenes that reveal truths about the culture and humankind.”
Stephen Dupont has produced photo essays from dozens of countries, including some of the world’s most dangerous regions: Afghanistan, Angola, Burma, Burundi, Cambodia, India, Iraq, Israel, Rwanda, Somalia, and Zaire. In April of 2008, he survived a suicide bombing while traveling with an opium poppy eradication team in Kabul. He has earned many prestigious photography prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America; a Bayeux War Correspondent’s Prize; and first places in the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Australian Walkleys, and Leica/CCP Documentary Award. In 2007, he was awarded the W. Eugene Smith Grant in Humanitarian Photography to continue Narcostan or The Perils of Freedom, a multi-media project documenting the effects of the drug trafficking in Afghanistan.
Dupont has held major exhibitions in London, Paris, New York, Sydney, Canberra, Tokyo, and Shanghai, and at Perpignan’s Visa Pour L’Image, China’s Ping Yao and Holland’s Noorderlicht festivals.
Dupont’s handmade photographic artist books and portfolios are in the collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Library of Australia, National Gallery of Victoria, Australian War Memorial, The New York Public Library, Berlin and Munich National Art Libraries, Stanford University, Yale University, Boston Athenaeum, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Joy of Giving Something, Inc.
About the Robert Gardner Fellowship in Photography
The Fellowship funds an “established practitioner of the photographic arts to create and subsequently publish through the Peabody Museum a major book of photographs on the human condition anywhere in the world.” The Fellowship committee invites nominations from experts around the world; nominees are reviewed and selected by a committee of three. The Fellowship provides a stipend of $50,000. The fellowship is unique in its dedication to funding professional documentary photography.
The Fellowship was given by Robert Gardner, award-winning documentary filmmaker and author, whose works have entered the permanent canon of non-fiction filmmaking. Gardner’s works include the documentary films “Dead Birds” and “Forest of Bliss” and books The Impulse to Preserve: Reflections of a Filmmaker and Making Dead Birds: Chronicle of a Film. In the 1970s Gardner produced and hosted “Screening Room,” a series of more than one hundred 90-minute programs on independent and experimental filmmaking. The series, considered an invaluable historical record of modern cinema, has been transferred to digital format for archival preservation by the Museum of Film and Broadcasting in New York City. Robert Gardner received Bachelor of Arts and Master of Arts degrees from Harvard University and was director of the Film Study Center from 1957 to 1997. He was also founder and long-time director of the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts and taught the Visual Arts at Harvard for almost 40 years. Gardner is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. His most recent book is Human Documents: 8 Photographers (Peabody Museum Press 2009), with images by eight photographers associated with the Film Study Center at Harvard over a period of nearly fifty years.
For more information call 617-496-1027 or go online to: www.peabody.harvard.edu. The Peabody Museum is located at 11 Divinity Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The Museum is a short walk from the Harvard Square MBTA station.
Image: tephen Dupont, “Asoro Mudman from the Mando Tribe”, Eastern Highlands Province, Papua New Guinea. 2004. Photo: ©Stephen Dupont
