CAMBRIDGE -- Michael Rockefeller was the youngest son of Nelson Rockefeller's first marriage. He graduated from Harvard in 1960, during the first of his father's four terms as governor of New York. A year later he died, on the second of two anthropological expeditions to New Guinea, when his catamaran capsized. In honor of his son's memory, Nelson Rockefeller later underwrote what is now the Michael C. Rockefeller Wing at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is devoted to the arts of Africa, Oceania, and the Americas.
Documenting the dynamic moment
Michael Rockefeller's pictures record New Guinea tribesmen beautifully
"Michael Rockefeller: New Guinea Photographs, 1961," which runs at Harvard's Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology through Feb. 27, looks at the first New Guinea expedition. It was a remarkable gathering of creative minds. Heading it was the documentary filmmaker Robert Gardner. His best-known film, "Dead Birds ," grew out of the expedition. Also present were novelist Peter Matthiessen and photographer Eliot Elisofon .
The exhibition comprises some 40 black-and-white photographs Rockefeller took, drawn from a total of about 3,500, of life among the Dani , a neolithic tribe. (The Rockefeller pictures, as well as the rest taken by the expedition, are part of the archive of the Film Study Center, which Gardner headed for four decades.) Rockefeller, who had been a history major as an undergraduate, had no background as a professional photographer. In fact, his primary responsibility wasn't visual: He was assigned the task of being the expedition's sound recordist .
Even so, his pictures are very good. It certainly helps that such a small percentage of the photographs he took are on display. But the exhibition includes a contact sheet, and the quality of its images indicates the rest of the show is no greatest-hits selection. Clearly, Rockefeller had an eye for composition and, what's far more unusual, a feel for the dynamic moment. He never posed his subjects. He didn't have to. There's one picture here, of a warrior caught from afar in exultant leap, that's so perfectly timed it looks almost comic.
The visual quality of the images makes it easy to forget that content mattered far more to Rockefeller than form did. Purely photographic considerations never obscured for him the defining documentary impulse of the larger enterprise. He was there to record not express. "Photography like other artistic mediums requires a very particular combination of talents," Rockefeller wrote in a journal he kept during the expedition, "and I now know that an eye sensitive to aesthetics by itself assures little."
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