Paul B. de Rautenfeld was a retired Swiss customs officer who later studied ethnology and biology. He made three trips to New Guinea and Indonesia in the 1920s and wrote three unpublished accounts of his travels, including descriptions of his photographic activity. During Rautenfeld's 1925 trip to the Papuan Gulf, Benjamin Butcher, a London Missionary Society preacher stationed at Aird Hills, told him about a rare figure he had seen called an Iriwaki. Rautenfeld's diary relates the circumstances of their journey to see and photograph the figure:

"I proceeded at once to Maiaki in order to avail myself of the high tide. . . . Inside the front entrance [of a typical longhouse], on the right, there was Iriwaki, one of the rare specimens of its kind still remaining in the Urama District. The famous god of war is a flat effigy about five feet high, in black, red, and white with boar's tusks encircling the tip of his nose and a grass skirt surrounding his loins. Fiber tassels are attached to his ears and a mairi [neckshell] painted in white across his chest and white horse-shoe-like figures on his belly are much in evidence. His head, up-lifted arms, and hands are also marked with broad white lines. Instead of the legs there is a long pole which is stuck through the floor into the mud underneath the building. Though it was very dark in the men's house, I succeeded in taking a portrait of Iriwaki by means of a five minutes' exposure."

This exhibition marks the first time that Rautenfeld's photograph and the actual irivake sculpture are exhibited together.