Picturing Indians: Photographic Encounters and Tourist Fantasies in H. H. Bennett's Wisconsin Dells (review)

The plethora of Indian images created by non-Indian photographers in the early twentieth century owes itself to the confluence of several factors: the rise of commercial photography, mass tourism, and the final conquest and colonization of Native Americans. The most famous photographer of Indians during this era was Edward Curtis. He intended his pictures to create a lasting record of presumably vanishing Indian lives. Other photographers, however, simply wanted to make a living and saw their efforts as a commercial endeavor. This volume, which displays and analyzes H. H. Bennett's photographs of Ho-Chunk people in the Dells region of Wisconsin, presents Bennett as the latter type.

Hoelscher, relying upon a variety of historical, anthropological, and literary methods, concludes that Bennett's Ho-Chunk subjects became objects of "the camera's colonizing gaze" (12). His camera represented part of technology's cultural domination of native people. Bennett, of course, did not consider such things. He simply wanted to sell his images to tourists visiting the Wisconsin Dells region; he played on his customers' romantic and nostalgic impulses, freezing the Ho-Chunk in time and conveying the "vanishing Indian" motif that was common to the era. Some people posed in landscape settings, others in Bennett's studio. All of the photographs ignored the devastating history of land loss and poverty.

Hoelscher argues that the Ho-Chunk were not mere victims. They found ways to survive, endure, and renew themselves through the photographic process. They earned badly needed cash by posing, although Ho-Chunk oral histories claim that Bennett offered only meager pay. Importantly, Bennett's correspondence reveals that his control over process and product was never complete. Ho-Chunk subjects actively shaped some of the photographs, "controlling image production" by insisting, for example, on wearing certain items and posing certain ways (136). Bennett may have intended to turn Ho-Chunk people into tourist objects, but they were equally determined to use these photographs to pursue their own projects and goals. Chief among those goals was economic and cultural survival.

Hoeschler's prose is accessible and his conclusions sound, even if familiar to scholars of Native American representations. He breaks no new theoretical ground. But there is freshness in his effort to incorporate contemporary Ho-Chunk views of Bennett's images and to compare these earlier photographs to the portraits that Tom Jones, a contemporary Ho-Chunk artist, created. Also new is the Midwestern setting (most other books about Indian photography focus on the American West) and the opportunity to explain this historical dynamic to audiences who have not thought about Native Americans' resistance to colonialism.

Hoelscher ends with the ultimate survival story. In the twenty-first century, Ho-Chunk people are purchasing land along the Wisconsin River that they lost in the nineteenth century. The funding source for at least part of their real estate transactions is their casinos. In a twist that Bennett might understand and appreciate, the Ho-Chunk use his photographs to advertise their gaming operations. In this way, they have reclaimed the images and put them to work for themselves