The Korowai: People of the Trees

In the spring of 2015, I embarked on an expedition to the Papuan rainforests to meet a tribe that, until the end of the 1970s, had no idea that other people lived in the world beyond them. This was one of the toughest expeditions I have ever taken part in. A week-long trek through impenetrable jungle, wading through swamps, and peeling off countless leeches: this is what the path to meet the tree people looked like.

The Korowai are inhabitants of the rainforests in southeastern Papua. They are one of the last "wild" tribes living on Earth. "Wild," meaning living completely isolated from civilisation, feeding themselves solely on what nature provides. They build their dwellings high in the tree canopy—this simultaneously protects them from insects, predators, and other tribes. Time, from the perspective of the white man, has stopped at the stage of a stone blade set on a stick. However, for the Korowai, the concept of time as we understand it is a complete abstraction. The photographs and stories will tell about the edge of the world, where one must fight nature for life, and a satellite phone is a useless object.