“We clicked in a random museum, in the middle of a blackout, on a rainy day,” Roberto Falck says of meeting John Walters, a volunteer at the McCarthy Museum in Goroka, Papua New Guinea. Falck, a portrait photographer, was in the country to continue a decadelong visual exploration that had taken him to places like Ecuador, Morocco, and Kenya, making photographs that convey the aesthetic beauty of tribal traditions. That afternoon, he had ducked into the small ethnographic museum to take a break from his travels.

Ideas were churning in Falck’s head from having spent a couple of days in a nearby Chimbu village. The Chimbu have a tradition of painting themselves as skeletons as a mode of psychological intimidation,