Ben Bohane is an Australian pho­to­jour­nal­ist and tv pro­duc­er based in Vanuatu in the South Pacific.

For the past 30 years he has spe­cialised in report­ing reli­gion, con­flict and cul­ture across the Asia Pacific region for a vari­ety of Australian and glob­al media includ­ing TIME, Vanity Fair and National Geographic. Most of his work since 1994 has been focused on the much under-reported Pacific islands region, where he has doc­u­ment­ed the for­got­ten con­flicts of Bougainville, West Papua, East Timor and New Caledonia among oth­ers.

With the glob­al “cen­tre of grav­i­ty” mov­ing from the Atlantic to the Pacific ocean, the Pacific region is now on the front­line of cli­mate change and geopo­lit­i­cal ten­sions between China and the US, and Bohane has focused on these sto­ries in recent years. Another area of inter­est for him has been the role of kas­tom, cult and cargo-cult move­ments across the region; how reli­gion and indige­nous belief sys­tems col­lide and co-exist, how they spark but also end con­flict, ush­er­ing in kas­tom rec­on­cil­i­a­tion process­es and peace.

His pho­tos are col­lect­ed by The New York Metropolitan Museum of Art, the British Museum and Australian War Memorial, as well as being held in pri­vate col­lec­tions.

He is the founder of Waka Photo Agency, the first pho­to agency in the Pacific, as well as a co-founder, along with Tim Page, of the Australian war pho­tog­ra­phers col­lec­tive degreeSouth. He is on the Advisory Council for the main think tank in the Pacific, the Pacific Institute of Public Policy, and cur­rent­ly works with the Pacific Security College based at the Australian National University.

His books include Follow The Morning Star about the strug­gle for inde­pen­dence in West Papua; War by the degreeSouth col­lec­tive; and The Black Islands - Spirit and War in Melanesia, a 20 year pho­to­graph­ic jour­ney through kas­tom and con­flict in Australia’s clos­est island neigh­bours. In 2014 he made “Island Style”, a one-hour doc­u­men­tary fol­low­ing the expe­ri­ence of Pacific island sol­diers serv­ing in Afghanistan that screened wide­ly across the Pacific. In 2019 he was the inau­gur­al win­ner of the Walkely/Sean Dorney award for Pacific jour­nal­ism.

More info can be found at: benbohane.com/about

A short mul­ti­me­dia pre­sen­ta­tion of his Black Islands work can be found here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZ_rEjVgkZQ&feature=youtu.be