The Dancer – A One Shot Story

Every so often, if we’re lucky, we’re reminded just how important photography can be in people’s lives. I got lucky the other week when I received a message on Instagram from someone who I didn’t know. The messenger asked if I was the photographer who captured an image of a dancer from Papua New Guinea, which was attached to the communication.

I was dumbstruck – I was indeed the photographer who made the image, but it was made in 1976, 48 years ago. It was made at the Hiri Moale Festival, on the outskirts of Port Moresby, the capital of PNG. I was there with my Nikkormat FTN, which in those days was always loaded with Kodak Ektachrome. I was in PNG as a graduate student doing field work for my thesis; I was on a six-month research trip around the Pacific Islands generously funded by the East-West Center in Honolulu, Hawaii, where I had a full-ride scholarship to complete my master’s degree in Pacific Islands Studies at the University of Hawaii-Manoa.

When I arrived in Port Moresby a few days earlier, I saw a newspaper story on the upcoming Hiri Moale Festival. I made my way to the performance venue – a sports pitch, as I recall. Not surprisingly we were supposed to have media accreditation to photograph dancers up close, and I didn’t have credentials. I strolled through a large dance troupe – women in colorful costumes, some with bones through their noses, all bare breasted. Soon enough, a security guard politely asked me if I had media credentials, and escorted me off the field when I said I did not.

But I did get two strong images of a young women dancer, and those transparencies are still in my keep. I had them professionally scanned about 10 years ago, and have posted one of the photographs. Somehow it must have made its way to the young women who contacted me.

She wrote,

“Hi Floyd, the attached image was credited to you and I was hoping I could ask you about it. If you are the original photographer, I’d love to know if you have more (photographs) on this particular group of dancers. I understand this to be a Hiri Moale Festival.” And then she wrote, “It is particularly important to me as I am a Rigo woman and I am trying to recover some traditional costume, including more knowledge of materials, weaving and making processes, and traditional placement and wear. Grateful if you can assist.”

I was delighted to assist. It occurred to me that the young woman in the photograph today would be in her 60s, if she’s still alive. So, it turns out that my photographs (I shared both photos that I still had) will help contemporary members of the clan recreate traditional dance costumes, a use I would never have guessed at in 1976.

My new friend noted one more element that I didn’t think about all those years ago:

“The traditional finery woven bands are woven using orchid plants. This method has long since disappeared from practice, and those that know the weave are dwindling in numbers. These days they use other more convenient materials.”

Sadly, my Nikkormat FTN long ago bit the dust. In 1978, I was a newspaper correspondent for the Pacific Daily News newspaper on Guam. I was sent to the Marshall Islands, where a group of islanders from Bikini Atoll were being evacuated from their ancestral home atoll for the second time since 1946, when the US Navy convinced the Bikinians to let the US test 23 nuclear weapons there.

I was aboard a launch, the first to bring correspondents ashore from the press boat, when a rogue wave rolled over us as we hit the beach. My Nikkormat took the full force of the salt water wave, but remarkably kept working for another three days. Sending it to Nikon in Japan for a shutter overhaul kept it alive for a time but it was the beginning of the end for that special camera (my first pro-spec SLR). I still have a Nikon film kit (based on the Nikon F100). But I miss that Nikkormat.

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