Native American Portraits: Points of Inquiry curated by Daniel Kosharek, Diane Bird, Andrew Smith (review)

Native American Portraits: Points of Inquiry, an exhibit of more than 50 historical images of American Indians and about a dozen contemporary photographs by Native American photographers, seeks to illustrate “a nation’s changing attitudes towards Native peoples” and the way contemporary Native photographers “explore, reclaim and recontextualize” historic portraiture. In a small space, the exhibit covers a century and a half of photographic documentation of Native Americans. Many of the vintage prints are rarely displayed, so it is a treat to be able to see the originals.

The exhibit was organized by the Museum of New Mexico and first opened at the New Mexico History Museum in 2012. It was curated by Daniel Kosharek, photo archivist at the Museum of New Mexico’s Palace of the Governors, archivist Diane Bird (Santo Domingo Pueblo) of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC), and Andrew Smith of the Andrew Smith Gallery in Santa Fe. The MIAC expanded the exhibit to include contemporary photographs by Native photographers, as well as scanned images contributed by community members.

At MIAC, Points of Inquiryis organized into five sections running chronologically from early works to contemporary imagery: Early Native American Photography (1860s–1880s); the Idea of Beauty (1880s–1930s); Tourism, Commercialism, Restrictions, and Bans (the first half of the twentieth century); Contemporary Work (1970s–present); and a sidebar Community Gallery. In the contemporary section at the end of the exhibit, community members are encouraged to bring in personal images to be scanned and displayed.

The exhibit’s main introductory label states: “Every portrait represents only a moment in time, a fragment of an event, a split second of a person’s life and a record of the photographer’s perspective on a subject.” This is an important statement that one hopes every viewer considers when looking at historic photographs such as these that have shaped the way mainstream society has thought about Indians. Each section has one large overview label, and caption labels for the photographs. Several of the sections also have quotations printed in large type on the wall. Most caption labels simply state the photographer, date, and name or tribe of the subject (if known), but those offering more information are worth looking for, as they help viewers see beyond the surface of the image to consider the subject as an individual whose daily life and circumstances were affected by specific federal regulations.

The first section (1860s–1880s) presents images that “reflect a federal effort to record tribal peoples threatened by annihilation.” The curators further explain: “The development of the West in concert with decades of shifting government policies towards Native Americans created a mania for scientific cataloging, in the belief that Native peoples were a ‘Vanishing Race.’” The historic photographs in this section are small and grouped tightly together, giving the impression of many direct, staring faces—perhaps an intentional reversal of expectations: spectators staring at the “Indian.”

Organized by photographer, the section presents a good overview of early work, including examples from the Department of the Interior’s US Geological Survey. This agency sought to create a descriptive catalog of Native Americans and by 1877 had accumulated more than 1,000 photographs. Alexander Gardner, who was Lincoln’s favorite photographer, often posed visiting Indian delegates in the same style as he posed Lincoln. Was this out of respect or a lack of creativity? The photographs attributed to Antonio Zeno Shindler are thought to be prints he made of other photographers’ work that hung at the Smithsonian Institution in 1867 in the first exhibit of photographs of Indians at an American museum. Charles Milton Bell’s studio portraits of such famous Native leaders as Manuelito for the most part show his subjects staring straight...