Joanna Cohan Scherer

Historical photographs as anthropological documents: A retrospect

This essay reviews recent anthropological literature relating to the analytical use of ethnohistorical photographs. It looks at some of the philosophical issues involved in studying photographs as documents and demonstrates the need to analyze a body of related and contextualized photographs in the triadic relationship of photographer/ subject/viewer.

Life among the Indians: First Fieldwork among the Sioux and Omahas

Alice C. Fletcher (1838-1923), one of the few women who became anthropologists in the United States during the nineteenth century, was a pioneer in the practice of participant-observation ethnography. She focused her studies over many years among the Native tribes in Nebraska and South Dakota. Life among the Indians, Fletchers popularized autobiographical memoir written in 1886-87 about her first fieldwork among the Sioux and the Omahas during 1881-82, remained unpublished in Fletchers archives at the Smithsonian Institution for more than one hundred years. In it Fletcher depicts the humor and hardships of her field experiences as a middle-aged woman undertaking anthropological fieldwork alone, while showing genuine respect and compassion for Native ways and beliefs that was far ahead of her time. What emerges is a complex and fascinating picture of a woman questioning the cultural and gender expectations of nineteenth-century America while insightfully portraying rapidly changing reservation life. Fletchers account of her early fieldwork is available here for the first time, accompanied by an essay by the editors that sheds light on Fletchers place in the development of anthropology and the role of women in the discipline.

Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher

This is a very readable book about the legendary American photographer Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952). There is a great deal that is charming and provocative about it, but it is a book for the general reader more than for the scholar. For scholarship about E. S. Curtis and his life one must still go to Mick Gidley’s publications. Egan reviews Curtis’s personal history and details his photographs of American Indians from his 1896 portrait of Angeline, Chief Seattle’s daughter, through to his work with the Inuit in 1927. A large number of Curtis’s images were reproduced in his 20-volume magnum opus, The North American Indians [1907–1930; republished by Taschen, 1997]. For this work he intended to document some 80 tribes and to collect audio recordings of Indian songs and languages [86]. And he did accomplish most of his goals. Curtis also photographed non-Indians, including the family of President Theodore Roosevelt— both formal and informal portraits [102–103]. The photographs in this illustrated work are strangely secondary to the text, not detailed in a table of contents, not keyed into the place in the text where they are described, and indeed not reproduced very well. Egan waxes and wanes regarding a number of the images, but the descriptions are evocative and do not advance our factual knowledge of the subject or the photographic event. For example, Egan describes the photos of Angeline: ‘‘What emerged from the many takes and the alchemy of developing chemicals was a face that could knock a door down with its slit-eyed stare . . . The lines of her face are so deep, so prominent, they look like scars from a knife fight, as if someone had carved her visage from a pumpkin . . . To look at the face and not see humanity is to lack humanity’’ [17]. Although this photograph of Angeline is found on p. 21, very few of the Curtis images that the author discusses are actually reproduced in this book, Visual Anthropology, 28: 183–185, 2015 Copyright # Taylor & Francis Group, LLC ISSN: 0894-9468 print=1545-5920 online DOI: 10.1080/08949468.2014.950109

Artifact Identification Using Historical Photographs: The Case of Red Cloud's Manikin

A stereograph depicting a manikin in Plains Indian clothing initiated this project. The manikin was made in the likeness of an Oglala Teton Sioux Chief, Red Cloud, whose 1872 visit to Washington was the impetus for making the figure. The same manikin was used again in the 1876 Centennial Exposition with a change of clothing to suggest a more warlike image. This essay explores why Red Cloud was selected as the subject for the manikin and shows how the study of the photograph led to identifying objects in the Smithsonian collections that had lost their provenance.

Picturing Indians: Photographic encounters and tourist fantasies in H. H. Bennett's Wisconsin Dells

There is an importance to the basic information concerning a historical photograph that cannot be disregarded or rationalised away by a political reading or by its use in creating art. Tsinhnahjinnie admits to the value of identifying photographs and the importance of preserving ‘precious visual histories that others longed for’ (14). Incorporating archival images into artwork does stimulate conversations about the reading of original images and seems to be the direction in which many Native American artists are going; still, I question whether this is a service or disservice to the family of origin of any particular Native American image.

Benedicte Wrensted: An Idaho Photographer of Indians

This project resurrects a Pocatello woman who had become merely a shadow in the historical record. Through the study of images, archives, newspapers and published sources, I am attempting to bring back into view the work of this remarkable photographer, Benedicte Wrensted [figure 1].