In the session titled, ‘Cultures on the Edge: Documenting Indigenous Tribes around the World’, Rainer described photography as a social tool to make the world a better place for future generations.
He said: “There are 6,000 languages - 80% indigenous, 80% oral; yet we are losing all this traditional knowledge and cultures at an alarming pace; and that is why I have committed myself to capture cultures from a primordial class living in the present - for future generations.”
Describing his first trip to New Guinea - “a remarkable island with 1,000 languages and extremely isolated communities”, Rainier elaborated on his 10-year quest to document the remaining Stone Age tribes of these islands.
New Guinea was also where he fell in love with the cultural practice of masks which has a profound connection to the spiritual world, he added.
Rainier, whose philosophy is to stay long enough in an area to understand its people, recounted the experience of sleeping one night with a mummified elder in Irian Jaya in West Papua, a province in Indonesia. He also shared the tale of meeting a nomadic eagle hunter in western Mongolia with a smartphone and Facebook account, and of meeting the only monk who had survived the Khmer Rouge onslaught.
The Director of Cultural Sanctuaries Foundation also described his fascination for India, a country with a rich culture including extensive mask rituals and described his meeting with monks in Bhutan who wanted training in technology such as video and still photography to document and keep their mask-making traditions alive.
“To me the wonderful thing about photography is that it is a passport that gives me the opportunity to travel around the world, allowing me to see things in a very different way,” said Rainier, who has photographed many masks around the world that had never been captured on film before.
Photographing vibrant cultures and tribes around the world – including one that did not have words for numbers, has taught him to reserve judgement and not be ethnocentric, he added.
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