Outsiders

Photojournalist Susan Meiselas ’70 first went to the Indonesian territory of West Papua to photograph the Dani in 1988, and she returned in 1996, each time compiling a trove of photographs and video of a people and a land unknown to Westerners before the 1930s. For her entire career, Meiselas has documented conflict zones: “hot wars,” such as the Sandinista takeover of Nicaragua in the late 70s; the world of refugees, as in Iraqi Kurdistan following the 1991 Gulf War; and the largely invisible simmer at the point of contact between mutually mysterious cultures, as in the case of the Dani and visitors from outside their home valley.

Meiselas first displayed her work with the Dani at the National Institute for Photography in the Netherlands in 2001. In two other works, a digital book and a traditional book, she served as curator as well as artist, assembling film clips, photographs and documents from 20th-century missionaries and Dutch colonial sources into an examination of change and continuity for the Dani through six decades of contact with outsiders—including with the Indonesian government, which today encourages them to mount mock battles in the name of tourism.