Portraits on a Rainy Morning in Mount Hagen, Papua New Guinea

Portrait: Western Highlands Woman applying face paint, Mt Hagen PNG

Festival Preparations
Getting oneself ready for attendance at a Papua New Guinea sing sing takes time and patience. In a dark classroom near the Mount Hagen Showgrounds, a woman from the Western Highlands applies her face paint.

Who hasn’t seen pictures of the colourful festivals in Papua New Guinea, where the seemingly endless array of tribal groups demonstrate their unique costumes, songs, dances, and elements of culture?

These festivals are are known as sing sings in Tok Pisin, the creole that allows tribal people from 850 distinct language groups to communicate with each other across Papua New Guinea. Sing sings are cross-tribal gatherings that enable groups to showcase their distinct cultural, dance, and musical traditions. They started as a replacement for tribal warfare: to foster cross-cultural understanding and to celebrate diversity. These days, however, the focus of the larger festivals is on attracting tourist dollars. Even so, they allow communities to pass on age-old traditions to the younger generation and help to preserve unique facets of culture that might otherwise be lost.

One of the best known of these shows is the Mount Hagen Sing Sing Festival which takes place every August high in the mountainous Western Highlands province of Papua New Guinea, and attracts almost 100 performing groups from around the country. I attended this sing sing some years ago now, before international travel was stopped in its tracks by Covid-19. I was travelling in the country with photographer Karl Grob l from Jim Cline Photo Tours, and a small group of photography enthusiasts.

One of the things I love about travelling with groups focussed on photography is that they tend to take more time in each location, permitting you to step ‘behind the scenes’ and to connect more with the local population. This was certainly the case on this trip: we had arrived in Mount Hagen a few days before the festival got underway, and had spent a couple of days meeting and photographing unique tribal groups at a village nearby (see: Wanders – Paiya Village). And, on the days of the Mount Hagen Sing Sing, we travelled to the site early, giving us time to interact with dancers and their entourages before they went ‘on stage’. On the second day of the show, I found my way into a school grounds, where a number of troupes were gathered.

August is the ‘dry season’ in the Highlands. But, this is tropical jungle country: it is hot and humid any time of year, and the rains will fall without notice.

And they did!

Join me as I shelter in dark classrooms, trying to capture environmental portraits in the rare patches of light:

Papuan man and woman outside with a large cooking pot, Mt Hagen PNG

Around the Cooking Pot
Visitors to the school outside the fairgrounds seem to have set up camp very effectively: you can just see the flames under the big cooking pot here.

Portrait: Papuan woman and child in front of a plastic-sheeted building, Mt Hagen PNG.

Mother and Child

Child on the Steps
People are dotted all around, outside, in the school grounds …

Face Painting
… and inside, in the dark classrooms where they are getting ready.

Smiling Western Highlands Woman
The women are happy to take time out from their preparations …

Headdress and Shell Necklace
… to have their pictures taken in the hot, dark, school rooms.

Western Highlands Woman
Every small locality in the Western Highlands has its own tribal groups – with slightly different costumes – …

“Kunai Brothers Culture Group”
… but shells, bird feathers and bird parts, and beads, are common elements across most of them.

Kunai Brother’s Man
Groups from neighbouring villages have different headdresses …

Kunai Brother’s Red
… and face paint styles.

Smiling Man – Kunai Brother Culture Group
These men, whose hats and face paint bore a resemblance to some I’d seen the day before, were getting ready on the school veranda.

Dancing in the Room
Meanwhile, back in a classroom, some Western Highlands women were rehearsing.

In the Rain
August might be one of the coolest months in the Western Highlands, but average maximums are still 27°C (80°F). It is not rainy season, but humidity is almost 90%, and rain is more likely than not. While we are watching the festival preparations, the skies open up, and people take shelter.

Child in the Doorway
Many of the school buildings are unfinished – but they still provide shelter from the cloudburst.

Man in the Doorway
Common tribal jewellery includes pig tusks and a variety of seashells.

Decrepit Van
Much of the school grounds have a tumble-down feel to them, but at least the rains have cooled things off outside – temporarily. (iPhone6)

Women Helping Each Other
Inside, it is hot and crowded. It is as if every community in the surrounding hills has its own cultural performance group, and as if each of these groups has found their own niche in the school buildings.

Girl at a Window
The only light in the classrooms comes slanting through the windows.

Young Woman Smoking
In another room, women in headdresses made of feathers, fur, and shells, are smoking, chatting, and playing cards.

Highland Woman
This group’s headdresses were quite distinctive. Although vegetation is a common costume element, for example: in crimped grass skirts; moss-filled headdresses; and decorative leaves in armbands; this hat made of overlapped layered leaves was in a style I didn’t see from any other tribe.

Old Man in a Hat
Inside another classroom, there is light coming in through one of the louvre windows. The locals in the room take turns posing next to this window for me.