Here's a highly recommended 16-minute long movie documentary of Joey L.'s (and his team) excursion into the land of the Mentawai. It starts with the 10-hour crowded cargo ferry ride from Sumatra across the strait to the islands of the Mentawai, approximately 150 kilometers off the Sumatran coast.

The excursion took 2 years to plan and prepare, and we are treated to a behind the scenes look at the photo shoots along with snippets of the Mentawai's life. The amount of gear that Joey and his team had to carry was quite significant. This is not a destination where you show up with a couple of cameras and flashes. They had to lug heavy lighting equipment, large reflectors and lightboxes, cameras, lenses, video equipment, generators, food and so forth.

The most visible Mentawai tribesmen in the documentary are Bajak Tarason and Bajak Tolkot, who seem to have a pessimistic view of the Menatawai's future. They address the interference of the Indonesian government in their ancient tribal customs, and of the Christian missionaries who seek to change their belief system.

It's Bajak Tolkot who invites the world to visit the Menatawai islands, to witness their way of life before it's too late. I really hope very few people take him on this invitation. I realize that an influx of tourists could bring a much needed infusion of prosperity to the Mentawai, but it would also accelerate the demise of their way of life, or turn them into performers; wearing their loin cloths and brandishing their arrows for the tourists' cameras.

In the documentary, I've seen young Mentawai wearing graphic t-shirts, including one of Donald Duck, posing next to a traditional Mentawai tribesmen. So the infiltration has already started, and not before too long, the baseball caps will appear as well. It's a shame that similar cultures and traditional ways of life can so swiftly disappear.

My thanks to Cathy Scholl for the heads-up on this movie.

Photo © Diego Vergés-All Rights Reserved
Photo © Diego Vergés-All Rights Reserved
Photo © Diego Vergés-All Rights Reserved

As I indicated in an earlier post on The Travel Photographer blog, Diego Vergés is back from his 4 months trip to Indonesia (and PNG) and its various islands, and is currently working feverishly on his inventory of images.

He tells me that he has so far edited and readied only one of his expected 8 or more photo essays on the various indigenous groups of Indonesia, and that's the gallery on the Mentawai. The images are spectacular, and I encourage you to view them as they provide a window into a culture which I suspect will soon vanish.

You'll notice Diego's characteristic lighting techniques from the above photographs, and which he told he learned from The Strobist. Photographing the Mentawai, he used off camera lighting, a reflector and a softbox. For cameras, Diego uses a Canon 5d and a 5d Mark II, with prime lenses (24mm f1.4 and 50mm f1.4).

The Mentawai are the native people of the Mentawai Islands, which is a chain of about seventy islands and islets off the western coast of Sumatra. They live a semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer lifestyle in the coastal and rain forest environments of the islands, and number about 64,000. They are known by their deep spirituality, body art and the tradition of sharpening their teeth for beautifying reasons.

The Mentawai practice traditional animism, and as with other indigenous cultures, are threatened by encroaching modernism.