For a Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw ed. by Nancy Marie Mithlo (review)

FOR A LOVE OF HIS PEOPLE is an ode to Horace Poolaw, a Kiowa man born at the turn of the century who photographed his community in southwestern Oklahoma throughout his life (1906–1984). The book combines a selected portfolio of Poolaw’s photographs with a collection of essays and is meant to accompany an exhibition of the same name at the National Museum of the American Indian from August 2014 to February 2015 in New York. For a Love of His People is a welcome and unique addition to the literatures of Indigenous history and visual culture. The fourteen contributors include members of Poolaw’s family and community, art critics, historians, and Native photographers. The combination of family, community, and academic perspectives gives the story depth and connects it in form and method to Barbara Hail’s Gifts of Pride and Love (2001), a text focusing on Kiowa cradleboards.

For a Love of His People delves into the life and times of a single historic photographer, examining significant topics arising in both Native photography and the Kiowa community. In doing so, it orients the scholarly conversation on the relationship between Poolaw and the people he knew and photographed. Thus it builds on works such as Henrietta Lidchi and Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie’s Visual Currencies: Reflections on Native Photography (2009) and Tsinhnahjinnie and Veronica Passalacqua’s Our People, Our Land, Our Images: International Indigenous Photography (2007), which examine Indigenous perspectives on photographers and the images they and others have created. Importantly, this book explores the Kiowa community though the mid-twentieth century, demonstrating the significance of Indigenous citizenship, military service, the connections that Poolaw and his subjects had to other Native people in Oklahoma and to a shared modern America.

Each contributor contextualizes the images with excursions into the history of photography by and of Native people, American Indian and Kiowa art history, women’s changing identities, and the Poolaw family. The result is a journey though layers of narratives centering on Poolaw himself, the history of photography, its danger and possibility, and Kiowa and American Indian life at mid-century. He is remembered as a father, great grandfather, an artist, and above all a man of his time attuned to the Kiowa community, which was undergoing a great deal of change during the early twentieth century. The message about Poolaw as a photographer is best articulated by photographer and artist Richard Ray Whiteman, who writes, “He is a participant in his own culture and known to those who appear in his photographs” (146).

The work itself feels like a conversation, and lively exchanges about Native modernities and hybridity thread though the discussion. Art historian David Penney refers to Poolaw’s photos and their content as “hybrids” that illustrate “the proliferation of things and their networks that shaped the cultural environment of Oklahoma during Poolaw’s day” (62). In contrast, historian Ned Blackhawk eschews the hybrid, arguing for the importance of agency in Poolaw’s work by writing that it “subverts the representational power of early American photography, challenging the naturalized and timeless suggestions about Native people” (72). Nancy Mithlo considers the more formal qualities and subject matter of his work. She notes his use of a perspective that allows the viewer to experience a photograph though multiple vantage points as Poolaw saw it (95). David Grant Noble describes “compositional and dynamic elements” that make him “both an artist and documentarian” (112).

Horace’s daughter Linda Poolaw and other relatives and community members share what the photographs mean to them as family and as Kiowa people. Linda Poolaw notes that through his photographs, “We can see our ancestors as they really are” (41). Kiowa artist Vanessa Paukeigope Jennings explained his photographs were like “our traditional art: They are a visual record to guide the generations of unborn Kiowa” (151). Additionally, contemporary Native photographers...