By Shawn Parker
Shawn Parker (Abenaki) is Education Coordinator for the Heritage Harbor Museum that is scheduled to open in 2005 in Providence, Rhode Island. He formerly served as Manager for Exhibit Interpretation at the MPMRC.
Beginning on October 25 an exhibition of signed photographs by Edward Sheriff Curtis will visit the Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center on loan from the Peabody Essex Museum of Salem, Massachusetts. The Peabody’s collection of Curtis’ work is among the finest in the world. The prints that appear in The Master Prints of Edward S. Curtis: Portraits of Native America were purchased and donated to the museum by a generous patron soon after they were displayed in Curtis’ exhibition The North American Indian in 1905-1906. Years later Curtis produced a multi-volume compilation with the same title, but the prints in this exhibition are special. Nearly a hundred years after the shutter opened in front of his subjects, Curtis’s prints give visitors an opportunity to experience his work – as well as to examine the historical impact of his photographic approach on an ongoing debate about how Native people should be represented on film.
At first glance, the artistry and beauty of these photographs is unmistakable. The platinum prints result from a process in which photographic images have been produced on paper that has absorbed the photo-chemical solution into itself. The resulting texture of prints such as A Zuni Head, 1900 heightens the impression that the artist hewed the visual image from rough natural materials. The texture of another print, Two Bear – Blackfoot Sacred Woman, is like the blanket that the subject has wrapped around herself. The photographs seem to hold only a thin beautiful veil between the viewer and the people on the other side.
In addition to their inherent qualities of rarity and beauty, these prints maintain a significant place in the history of the representation of Native people. They were seen by patrons, including the financier J.P. Morgan and President Theodore Roosevelt, who would support Curtis’ expensive efforts to document the daily life and cultures of many indigenous nations. Moreover, Curtis’ approach brought together two unique fields of representation and combined them in such a way that appealed to and shaped many people’s views of Native people. The two fields, documentary photography and artistic renderings, had long histories but had developed along very different lines since the rise of photography and the exhibitions of George Catlin’s paintings in the mid-nineteenth century.
Documenting Native people through photographs did not begin with Curtis. As citizens of the United States expanded across the continent, photographers followed the frontier and photographed leaders and other members of tribal nations, circulating their images as documentation of what they believed was a “vanishing race.” Ethnographers used photographs as evidence for the “scientific” study of indigenous cultures because photography was thought to capture reality in a way that gave the viewer access to something authentic and factual. In addition, it enabled the viewer to see without being seen, so one could study the people in a photograph without those people responding to the viewer’s gaze. As long as Native people have been photographed, there have been non-native people staring at and studying those photographs to visualize the differences between them and “the Indians.” We can observe the men in Apaches, 1904 to figure out what they are up to, how they wear their clothes and imagine what it might be like to be among them, but we do not have to talk to them, explain ourselves, or connect with them in any way. This has been part of the appeal of this kind of photography for many non-Native North Americans.
The other field of representation is that of artistic renderings, such as drawings, engravings, lithographs and paintings. Many such images appealed to the imagination and fostered fantasies about Native people that may or may not have had any basis in their lives or actions. Though some artists used these media to systematically document tribal cultures and people, as George Catlin did, audiences had come to accept that such images were prone to manipulation, fictionalizing and romanticizing. On the other hand, these representations are often very beautiful to look at, and therefore many have been judged primarily for their aesthetic qualities, independent of whether they accurately depicted the material, economic and social conditions of the subjects.
Curtis was moved by his experiences with Native people and he wanted to improve the quality and truthfulness of representations of them. Following the energetic movements in artistic photography at the beginning of the last century, he took the synthesis of photographic realism and romantic art that other photographers had been exploring and applied it to the representation of indigenous people and scenes. Without a doubt he did so masterfully, manipulating the camera and print-making processes to render images that could be called both beautiful and convincingly authentic. Curtis’ audiences were treated to an illusion of reality afforded by the medium of photography while enjoying much of the fantasy that fueled their imagination and fascination with indigenous people. In many cases he showed his audiences things that they had never seen before and depicted familiar subjects in unusual ways. The portrait titled Red Cloud bears an artistic and emotional sensitivity that stands out from the many other portraits of the great Oglala statesman, and the group portrait Hopi Girls Grinding Peke Bread Meal depicts the young women in the context of what we are to believe is their own familiar environment. In these ways Curtis’ beautiful and powerful images raised the bar on the visual representation of Native America.
While this exhibit displays compelling, dramatic scenes and portraits, rendered with a seductive beauty and artistry, Native people have mixed responses to these images. Some see proud portraits of their ancestors and desire to learn from them. Others do not see themselves in the world Curtis represented, which excluded certain people, particularly eastern Native people, from what the popular culture came to consider “authentically Indian.” There has also been substantial criticism of the way Curtis showed the everyday activities of a surviving people as romantic or as part of a bittersweet lost world. These differing views about Curtis and his work are addressed in the exhibit itself – as they also are in the permanent displays at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum. For example, museum visitors can view the contemporary portraits of Mashantucket Pequots taken by Kwakiutl photographer David Neel in the museum’s tribal portrait gallery, as well as the works of many other Native artists and photographers.
In the Curtis exhibit itself his powerful images will be accompanied by works by contemporary Native photographers who offer a different perspective and alternative points of view. Works by Shelly Niro (Bay of Quinte Mohawk), Jeff Thomas (Onondaga), and Marcus Amerman (Choctaw) challenge and engage the photographic record produced by Curtis and others. Their contemporary images demonstrate that photography is part of the ongoing dialogue between Native and non-Native people. The prominent place of Curtis’ work and the central place that Native people play in that visible conversation are what make this exhibit so important and compelling.
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