Eighteen thousand Kamoro live along the southwestern coast of New Guinea. Their ancestors first roamed this land more than 50,000 years ago. By the early 1960s, just 50 years after the arrival of missionaries and colonial administrators, the unique culture of the Kamoro had been driven to the verge of extinction. Or so it was thought until photographer Kal Muller stumbled upon an initiation ceremony and found that traditional Kamoro life was still alive and thriving. This work provides an account of a culture that is rapidly disappearing and the wrenching process of change that the Kamoro have had to endure. It presents a portrait of how an isolated, nomadic past meets a worldly, urban future, and how history confronts superstition.
Between the Tides : An Journey among the Kamoro of New Guinea