Organizing the photos

July 6, 2014

Shiva's Crowd-funding Poster - Bossboi Gul with a balloon

 

As soon as Shiva learned that she had received the Hays-Mortimer travel grant, she set about looking through the whole collection of Jablonko photos that had been digitized and archived at ODSAS in Marseilles, France.  She selected a hundred images as well as a number of original Maring paintings. 

These paintings had been made on paper with the watercolors and colored pens we had brought with us in 1963 at Margaret Mead's suggestion.  It would have never occurred to us to bring such supplies, but Mead was right.  We were glad when we saw that this medium, so familiar to us, proved to be intriguing to our hosts.

Having downloaded and printed the photographs and paintings in postcard size, Shiva arranged and rearranged them on the wall of her rented room in Sydney.  Slowly she developed a sense of how they could be arranged in exhibits in university libraries as well as used for illustrations for the crowd-funding project.

 

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One of the Australian supporters of the "Searching for Grandfathers" project was a professional photographer. He enlarged a select few for her and framed them so they could be safely, if carefully, carried to PNG for display at the University of Goroka library and later in Madang at Divine Word University.

 

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One of his favorites was a portrait of a Maring boy in Dikai dancing at the konj kaiko in November, 1963.

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Meanwhile,  I was thinking about the best format we could create for the photos that we would be taking to the people in Simbai:

Would there be a school where we could fasten the photos to a wall?  

How would the photos hold up in the humid air of the mountains?  

How would the people carry them back to their homes?

 

Shiva showed us the location of an office supply store not too far way.

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Their photo service offered do-it-yourself postcard-size prints for 10 cents a piece. It also sold plastic albums. These seemed like a good bet. 

While Shiva attended to other preparations, Alvilda and I grappled with the Kodak machinery, entering individual frame numbers and quantities to be printed.

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We needed five copies of each, as I figured I would want to present an album to whoever was representing each of at least five different clans or families, even though I really had no idea which families had descendants fifty years on. 

Having just arrived from Europe on June 30, Alvilda was still in the fog of jet lag and, thus, perfectly suited for this mindless mechanical job.

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Neither Alvilda nor I had been in a "big box" store for some time. We were quite impressed to see the endless aisles full of all imaginable supplies for schools and offices.  

 

Once the order was complete and we had picked it up, I spent a couple of evenings sorting the five sets and slipping each  print into the pages of the little plastic albums that I hoped would be weatherproof.

VJ 2014-07-06 10.09.29

VJ 2014-07-06 10.10.01

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