Irving Penn took a series of extraordinary photographs at the 1970 Goroka Agricultural Show, a great gathering of tribes held annually in the Highlands, attended by thousands of villagers, many elaborately plumed & painted.

As usual, Penn employed a collapsible, portable studio with one wall open & the camera outside, looking in. The secret of this studio is that it created its own space - space without background.

The moment subjects stepped across that threshold, they changed totally. All confusion & excitement ceased. Even those outside became still. A sudden intensity possessed everyone.

The same subjects who moments before posed comically for tourists, affecting exaggerated poses, now behaved with intense concentration. Their bodies became rigid, their muscles tense; their fingers tightly gripped whatever they touched. When Penn repositioned them, he found their bodies stiff in a way he never found subjects in our society.

The crowd outside, looking in, also became rigid. Chaos ceased & the scene became a tableau.

If this were merely my account, it might easily be dismissed as something contrived to fit the thesis of this book. But I have tried to record here, as best I remember them, Penn's own words. And the evidence is also in the photographs.

These photographs aren't anthropological documents in the usual sense. They don't record moments out of daily life. No captions explaining decorations or describing ceremonies would be relevant. Absolutely nothing that can be said about the culture or personality of the subjects is pertinent to their pictures. What holds us, fascinates us, is their stance and, above all, their eyes.

A camera is the ideal instrument for preserving the momentary art of body decoration & face paint. But ordinary photographs can preserve such art. These photographs are not ordinary. Penn has captured something so elusive, so momentary, that were it not for the fact the camera created it, it's unlikely a camera could record it.

And even now, with that elusive something captured & spread before us, we scarcely know what to make of it. One thing is certain: on every face, even the faces of children, there is fear. Not fear of camera or cameraman. Not ordinary fear.

If this were ordinary fear, subjects would be glancing for reassurance toward companions outside. Instead, they stare at the lens.

Nor is this the fear of those who, seeing their images for the first time, cover their mouths to preserve their identities. For participants at the Goroka Fair, that was past history. Most knew a good deal about cameras. They knew their spirits were so powerful they could do more than cast a reflection on a mirror; they could leave a permanent imprint on that mirror, an imprint that would preserve forever this moment, this man.

The terror in their eyes is the tribal terror of being recognized as individuals.

Bedecked in barbaric splendor once designed to strike fear into enemies & humility into rivals, these ex-warriors asked to be recorded for posterity. Yet what we see is not fearful expressions, but expressions of fear combined with an exaltation that confers an awesome dignity on every subject. We see men at the very moment they voluntarily leave everything familiar & step forever into limbo, going through that vanishing point alone & going through it wideawake.

When Alice went through that looking glass, Victorians called her a fairy-tale figure, but the coming of new media meant we would all go through that vanishing point from which none return unchanged.

Now it was the New Guineans' turn.

Everyone who watched understood. Those outside kept their eyes on the subjects, while subjects kept their eyes on the lens. They never looked at Penn, nor to one side, nor at those outside. Their eyes fixed unwaveringly on that single point, no matter how long the session. That point was the point men enter when they leave this world behind & step alone, absolutely alone, into limbo. That was the source of their terror & exaltation & intense self-awareness.

One sees that same intensity in Matthew Brady's Civil War photographs; in portraits of Indians in the Old West; in Renaissance paintings of unsmiling dukes staring down eternity. Our eyebeams lock with those of strangers at some timeless, spaceless point. Those eyes stare back at us with an intensity we seldom encounter today in the portraits of our smiling leaders & graduating seniors.

Rembrandt was said to be the first great master whose sitters sometimes dreaded seeing their portraits. Perhaps one reason we could never produce another Rembrandt is that we no longer produce such sitters.

The technology that lifted man out of both his environment & his body, allowing him to enter & leave limbo at will, has now become so casual, so environmental, we make that trip with the numbness of commuters, our eyes unseeing, the mystery of self-confrontation & self-discovery gone.