ENCOUNTERS WITH THE DANI

by Susan Meiselas (Photographer)

In her most recent body of work, acclaimed photographer Susan Meiselas pieces together verbal and visual traces of encounters with the Dani--an indigenous people of the West Papuan highlands--from the nearly six decades since their "discovery" by the West. In this subjective, fragmentary history, Meiselas draws from the experiences of missionaries, colonists, anthropologists and modern-day ecotourists, all of whom have come to the Dani's Baliem Valley and transformed the conditions under which they live. The ambiguous relations between power and representation--whether in the form of Dutch colonial patrol notes from the 1930s, the sensationalized media accounts of the survivors of a downed U.S. army plane in "Shangri-La" from the 1940s or a tourist's snapshots from the 1990s--become visible in Meiselas's book, through both the contradictions and unexpected continuities of the gathered materials.

176 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2003

About the author

Susan Meiselas is a documentary photographer based in New York. She is the author of Carnival Strippers (1976), Nicaragua (1981), Kurdistan: In the Shadow of History (1997), Pandora’s Box (2001), Encounters with the Dani (2003) Prince Street Girls (2016), A Room Of Their Own (2017), Tar Beach (2020), and Carnival Strippers Revisited (2022).

Meiselas is well known for her documentation of human rights issues in Latin America. Her photographs are included in North American and international collections. In 1992 she was made a MacArthur Fellow and received a Guggenheim Fellowship (2015). Most recently, she received the first Women in Motion Award from Kering and the Rencontres d’Arles (2019), the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize (2019), and the Erich Salomon Award of the German Society for Photography (2022). Mediations, a survey exhibition of her work from the 1970s to present was initiated by the Jeu de Paume in Paris and traveled to Fundació Antoni Tàpies, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Instituto Moreira Salles in São Paulo, among others.

Meiselas has been the President of the Magnum Foundation since 2007, with a mission to expand diversity and creativity in documentary photography.

Reviews

[Larry]

First of all, full disclosure: I was a collaborator and contributor to this book, helping Susan Meiselas find people with photos and stories and contributing the essay "Stealing a Good Name" about my youth in the Baliem with the Dani.
Susan has assembled a rare and remarkable collection of visual materials about the Dani, beginning with their "discovery" in 1938 by the Archbold expedition of the American Museum of Natural History. (My book about this expedition is forthcoming from University of Hawaii Press in 2017 as "Darwin's Seaplane Pilot.")