American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This essay derives from the simple fact that the Navajo seldom have had much input into their imaging in photography. But this fact has many more implications than might initially appear-some implications common to all minority groups subject to a powerful and very aggressive majority with a discursively saturated Western technology at its disposal, and some implications peculiar to the Navajo and their experiences with the West. Photographers of Navajo derived from Western conventions, registers, tropes, photographic practices, and constitutions that dictated their project-whatever their intentions and however much they might have assumed or argued or quite genuinely felt they were representing Navajo. So we will be examining something of what it means to be Navajo, in photographs.The essay is also but a scan-more detailed treatment may be found elsewhere in an extended volume devoted specifically to a critical history of the photography of Navajo. Despite the tenacious classic view, no one would now argue that photography is simply transparent, and photographers present themselves and their cultural history in the exercise, by the exercise; the assumption that somehow we can learn much about Navajo culture (rather than literally the Western view of Navajo culture) from these images is indeed bizarre. How could such images present Navajo if they were not Navajo presentation? Of course, all kinds of other things may be learned, mostly about the discourse guiding the photographers and Navajo in Western history and in interaction with the West.