Irving Penn’s New Guinea Man with Painted-On Glasses

Beyond the Paint

Transcript: My name’s Michael Mel. I’m from the Mogei community in Mount Hagan. What you see in that image is obviously a warrior from my area in the Western Highlands Province of the Highlands of Papua New Guinea. When this image was taken, it would’ve been taken at a cultural show or festival, and a group of them would’ve been asked to perform. The headdress and the performance are fairly significant to Western Islands communities because they indicated a significant aspect of cultural life. It’s the kind of decoration people would’ve had when they were dancing and performing and celebrating peacemaking ceremony. What is atop the man’s head is a wig — a wig that is made entirely of human hair. The hair would’ve been collected mostly from young men. The boys were asked to bring their hair in and a specialist, or a person whose skills are to build the wig, would trim their hair, and then he would gradually put all of those hair together in that shape. That wig is worn by young men who’ve been initiated and who are now part of the community, and then passed on to others in the generation. Men used to wear them, but also women, particularly wives of chiefs and very significant women. The other aspect that’s very significant are the leaves — those three white leaves. The underside is the white, the topside is usually green, as well as the green moss, quite often that’s up in the higher altitudes, adding to the decorations of the wig, and the face, and the ears, and so forth. So it’s a connection to the land and to the environment. You will see the man’s eyes and face have been partly covered in black, and that’s made of ash that would’ve been crushed and then mixed with fat to stick onto the face of the dancer. And then the white strips, as well as the “glasses,” if you like, that surround the dancer’s eyes are made of white clay. And that relates very much to when you look at the birds of paradise. What is around the eyes — and the color and the very fine featherwork that nature, in its own way, has had to put on the birds’ faces, and in particular around the eyes, were very significant to Highlands communities. So taking on that aspect of the birds onto our own faces, so we are like birds as well. The eyes are very significant and the ears are very significant senses for the Highlands communities because that’s the way they read the environment and the environment, if you like, read them. So interpreting, reading signs and that — for example, you hear a bird at a certain time, you know that it’s going to rain. A splendid array of featherwork, that would’ve been planted on top of the wig for the dancer. And that would’ve been coming from so many species of birds of paradise. And so when you danced and performed, the flightiness and the movements all aligned with birds. When the men would’ve danced, they would sing of the great leaders, and there’d be recollection of memory and history, but all put into that musical format. They’d do a small plié, a set of them, almost on tippy-toes, where you’d go up and down and up and down, and that would then allow the feathers to sway back and forth in time. And then you’d have drums that would accompany. The photograph would’ve been taken when the dancer had actually come out of the performance; he had put away his precious feathers. And people do not wear the wig alone, so he had to wear the two sticks on either side on the wig, just to show that it’s not empty. Quite often people in our communities see body decoration as a window into your soul, so that very fine things are displayed to show what is really on the inside, to those on the outside. Image: Irving Penn, New Guinea Man with Painted on Glasses, 1970, printed July 1979. Platinum-palladium print, 20 3/16 x 19 3/4 in. (51.3 x 50.1 cm.) The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of The Irving Penn Foundation, 2020, 2020.314.9 © The Irving Penn Foundation