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 grew up in San Diego,
California,
yet has spent most of her adult life in places very different from her
own. She started taking pictures seriously while living in Guatemala
in the mid-1970s, and soon found black & white photography to
be her particular form of artistic expression. In 1982 she accom-panied
an anthropologist to the remote Fly River in Papua New Guinea, where
she photographed for three years while living in the traditional
villages and camps of the sparsely-populated, pristine wetlands and
lowland rainforest.
Although
she organized exhibitions from this body of work after returning to the
United
States, Ms. Turner
realized that she had
only just begun her affair with the beautiful and culturally diverse
country. In 1990 she returned to fill the position of lecturer in
photography at the University of Papua New Guinea.
She later began working as a professional photographer, principally
with mining and petroleum companies, while at the same time taking
every opportunity to pursue her personal photographic interests. Over
the years Ms. Turner has traveled by foot, canoe, helicopter, bush
plane, truck, cargo and luxury ship, throughout the mainland and
islands, often staying well off the beaten track with friends and
"relatives" for weeks at a time.
Recently,
Ms.Turner moved to Cairns, Australia,
in order to set up a practical base for editing and printing her
extensive photo-graphic archive. She now commutes to Papua New Guinea
for assignments, as well as her own work.
Ms.
Turner has exhibited her photographs in public and private galleries in
the United States
and Australia,
and she produced the images for The people of Lake Kutubu and Kikori: Changing
Meanings of Daily Life, a Papua
New Guinea National
Museum
and Art
Gallery
publication. Her second book, A Distant Place,
A Different Voice: Twenty Years in Papua
New Guinea, was published by
Futura Press to coincide with two exhibitions in California
in 2003.
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