On the Frontier of Photography: Carl Lumholtz and the Kodak Snapshot Camera

In September 1890 the Norwegian naturalist and ethnographer Carl Lumholtz crossed the border into Mexico from Bisbee, Arizona. He was embarking on an expedition that in time would be the first of four, leading from the states of Sonora and Chihuahua as far south as Michoacán. Underlying his commitment to this venture was his experience as an explorer in Queensland, Australia. There, between 1880 and 1884, sponsored by the Zoological Museum in Christiana (as Oslo was then called), he collected plant and animal specimens. While spending the better part of a year in the remote Herbert River region, he came to appreciate the aboriginal people of the area, valuing their help and their knowledge of local flora and fauna. Having gone to Australia as a botanist and zoologist, he returned to Norway, a would-be ethnographer. Several years passed, however, before he decided on a way to pursue this new professional direction. As he subsequently wrote in Unknown Mexico, his account of his Mexican travels:

I first conceived the idea of an expedition to Mexico while on a visit to London in 1887. I had, of course, as we all have, heard of the wonderful cliff-dwellings in the Southwest of the United States, of entire villages built in caverns on steep mountain-sides, accessible in many cases only with the aid of ladders. Within the territory of the United States there were, to be sure, no survivors of the race that had once inhabited those dwellings. But the Spaniards, when first discovering and conquering that district, are said to have come upon dwellings then still occupied. Might there not, possibly, be descendants of the people yet in existence in the northwestern part of Mexico hitherto so little explored?¹

It is not clear what individuals, lectures, or readings may have inspired him during his London visit but his decision can be understood in the context of the increasing interest at the time in the anthropology and archaeology of the American Southwest. In 1879, in an early effort to promote serious study of Native Americans, John Wesley Powell, the geologist and explorer who became the founding director of the Bureau of Ethnology—later the American Bureau of Ethnology—sent the anthropologists John Stevenson; his wife, Matilda Coxe Stevenson; and Frank Hamilton Cushing to study the Zuni Indians. The same year saw another milestone in the growing attention to the past and present of the area, the founding of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). The first president of the institute, the art historian Charles Eliot Norton (and others), favored a focus on the archaeology of ancient Greece and Egypt—wasn’t the investigation of ancient “high cultures” far more important than excavating the paltry remains of peoples whose descendants were still only a few steps above savagery? But the historian Francis Parkman (who had lived for a period with the Sioux Indians) and Frederick Ward Putnam, director of Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, were successful in pressing to make American archaeology one of the goals of the institute. At the suggestion of the pioneering anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, this policy led to the choice of the scholar-archaeologist Adolph Bandelier to explore and document archaeological sites in the Southwest. As early as February 1880, however, even before the AIA had made a firm commitment to sponsoring him in the Southwest, Bandelier had already conceived of extending his work into Mexico, thus prefiguring Lumholtz’s plan of ten years later.² It’s reasonable to surmise that these and other developments³ were known to Lumholtz. They may well have inspired his decision and led him to meet with Bandelier and to visit the Zuni before his entry into Mexico in 1890.

With his wish to find in Mexico the descendants of the builders of cliff dwellings north of the border Lumholtz hoped to establish a lost link not only between past and present but—perhaps less explicitly—what had become politically separate worlds, the North American Southwest and the northwest of Mexico. He did not...