Papua New Guinea 2007

Photos taken during my three month fieldwork in Papua New Guinea in the summer of 2007. I went to PNG to gather material for my MA thesis (social and cultural anthropology) on the political effects of logging in local communities. I spent my time in PNG mostly in the Wide Bay area of East New Britain Province.


Photos taken mostly with a Canon AE-1 on Fuji (ISO 100) positive film. Some shots taken with a cheap digicam that my brother lent to me. (The crucial thing was that there was no electricity, so loading batteries was not an option.) The choice of film turned out to be a really bad one. I thought that non-light sensitive film would be good in the tropics, but nothing was further from the truth. The village in which I stayed was located in a forested area, which means there was very often not very much light. In addition to this, I stayed there during the peak of the rainy season, so it was fairly often cloudy.

Also, due to the extreme humidity of the rainy season, my film rolls were damaged by moisture. Miraculously no frames (not to mention entire rolls!) were lost, but some frames were clearly damaged by moisture.

I developed the films in Australia, and the people in the laboratory told that my films "smelled bad" and were "incredibly sticky". They refused to develop one roll on the grounds that it might spoil the chemicals, but luckily a lab here in Helsinki developed it. Luckily, since the roll contained many of my favourite shots from this trip.

So, if you're going into the tropics, make sure your films are deposited somewhere dry.

110 photos | 229 views

items are from between 27 Jun 2007 & 11 Jun 2008.