Stephen Dupont: Papua New Guinea Portraits and Diaries at Harvard’s Peabody Museum

CAMBRIDGE, MASS.- The Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University presents a new exhibition by award-winning Australian photographer Stephen Dupont. As the Museum’s 2010 Robert Gardner Photography Fellow, Dupont returned to Papua New Guinea and explored the mountainous Highlands, the serpentine Sepik River and the dangerously gritty capital city, Port Moresby. His photographs and artist’s journals document tremendous social change caused by globalization, HIV-AIDS, migration, poverty, and new wealth.

Stephen Dupont, Untitled, from the Sing-Sing series, Enga Show

In his travels across Papua New Guinea—located north of Australia, on the eastern half of the island of New Guinea —Dupont set up temporary outdoor studios and made innovative portrait photographs.

“I use white and black bed sheets to create an outdoor studio that not only captures my sitter but also allows me to reveal the audience gathering and the environment around the sheet,” says Dupont. “You feel as if you are on the streets of Mt. Hagen or in a Sepik village.”

Dupont’s portraits, landscapes, and diaries are a journey through Papua New Guinea’s villages, cities, mines, valleys, and traditional tribal ceremonies.

Stephen Dupont is a photographer, artist and documentary filmmaker. Over the past two decades, he has produced a remarkable body of visual work; hauntingly beautiful photographs of fragile cultures and marginalized peoples. He skillfully captures the human dignity of his subjects with great intimacy and often in some of the world’s most dangerous regions. His images have received international acclaim for their artistic integrity and valuable insight into some of the peoples, cultures, and communities that are fast disappearing from our world.

Dupont’s work has earned photography’s most prestigious prizes, including a Robert Capa Gold Medal citation from the Overseas Press Club of America, a Bayeux War Correspondent’s Prize, and First Place awards in the World Press Photo, Pictures of the Year International, the Australian Walkleys, and Leica/CCP Documentary Award.

His work has been featured in The New Yorker, Aperture,Newsweek, Time, GQ, Esquire, Le Figaro, The Sunday Times Magazine, The Independent, The Guardian, The New York Times Magazine, Stern, and Vanity Fair.

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 selected collections of the National Gallery of Australia, National Library of Australia, The New York Public Library, Berlin and Munich National Art Libraries, Stanford University, Yale University, and the Boston Athenaeum.

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1. Raskols and Sing-Sing by Stephen Dupont at Jack Bell Gallery
2. Kevin Bubriski Named Visiting Artist Fellow at the Peabody Museum
3. The Kennedys: Portrait of a Family on View at the Peabody Essex Museum
4. Los Angeles County Museum of Art presents “Stephen Prina: As He Remembered It”
5. Photographs by Yorgo Alexopoulos, Stephen Gill and Burton Machen at Invisible-Exports