Piksa Niugini is built as a pair. Radius Books issued the project in two hardcover volumes in a slipcase: the first gathers Stephen Dupont’s portraits made across Papua New Guinea; the second holds the diaries, drawings, contact sheets and documentary photographs produced along the way. The Australian photographer travelled through four zones—the Highlands, Sepik, Bougainville and the capital, Port Moresby—and the two-volume arrangement allows the finished portraits and the record of their making to be read against one another. The work was carried out with the support of the Robert Gardner Fellowship of Photography at Harvard’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, and the book is co-published with the Peabody Museum Press.
The portrait volume is printed largely in duotone, with a small group of colour images; the diary volume is almost entirely colour. That division is the book’s central editorial decision. Rather than fold the process into the portraits, Dupont and his collaborators keep the two registers distinct, so the diary material is not illustration or appendix but a companion body of evidence: who was met, where, and under what conditions. Bob Connolly contributes an essay and Robert Gardner a foreword, framing the project without displacing the photographer’s own account.
Dupont has photographed fragile cultures and marginalised peoples since he began working in 1989, and the Papua New Guinea material continues that commitment. What matters here is the way the publication handles it. The four regions are not interchangeable backdrops but places with distinct cultural and historical weight, and the double structure lets the portraits carry one kind of attention while the diaries carry another—encounter, sequence, accumulation. Each volume reads differently, and the slipcase makes the pairing explicit.
Collectors interested in documentary practice, in the photobook as a designed argument, or in photographic engagements with Papua New Guinea will find the two-volume form the book’s most concrete distinction. The division between portraits and working papers is not decorative; it is the project’s method, set out in print by Radius Books and the Peabody Museum Press.
