North American Indian Photographs/Images
Abstract
North American Indian Photographs/Images Side Trips: The Photography of Simmer W. Matteson, 1898-1908. By Louis B. Casagrande and Phillips Bourns. Seattle: University of Washington Press, distributors for Milwaukee Public Museum and The Science Museum of Minnesota, 1984. 256 pp. $24.95 Paper. Coast of Many Faces. By Ulli Steltzer and Catherine Kerr. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. 224 pp. $25.95 Cloth. Inuit: The North in Transition. By Ulli Steltzer. Seattle: University-of Washington Press, 1983. 224 pp. $29.95 Cloth. A Haida Potlatch. By Ulli Steltzer, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1985. 96 pp. $14.95 Cloth. The Enduring Navaho. By Laura Gilpin. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1980 [1968]. 264 pp. $37.50 Cloth. Hopi Photographers, Hopi Images. Compiled by Victor Masayesva, Jr. and Erin Younger. Tucson: Sun Tracks and the University of Arizona Press, 1983. Ill pp. $25.00, Cloth. $14.95 Paper. The Blackfeet Reservation, 1885-1945: A Photographic History of Cultural Survival. By William E. Farr. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1984. 232 pp. $19.95 Cloth. Window on the Past: The Photographic Ethnohistory of the Northern and Kaigani Haida. By Margaret B. Blackman. Ottawa: National Museum of Man Mercury Series, Canadian Ethnology Service Paper No. 74, 1981. 236 pp. N.p. Paper. Side Trips constitutes further evidence of the marked rise over the last two decades of serious consideration of the history and meaning of photography. Insofar as this increasing awareness has affected our understanding of the photography of American Indians, one aspect of the progress may be charted in the discovery or rediscovery of photographers, such as Sumner Matteson, whose images might otherwise have been consigned to oblivion. I am thinking-to give just two examples-of the anonymous British Royal Engineers who in 1860 or 1861 made the earliest known photographs of interior Pacific Northwest peoples and of Edward H. Davis, who worked in Mesa Grande.l Initially Matteson might seem less important than such others as these in that he counted no photographic coups, as it were, and only part of his output, if a significant part, was devoted to Native American subject matter. But, on reflection, this means that his Indian work, represented by approximately half of the images in this book, each as meticulously documented as possible, must be seen in context.