Edward Sheriff Curtis has garnered his share of retrospective disdain for his once-celebrated photographs of Native Americans.

Edward Sheriff Curtis has garnered his share of retrospective disdain for his once-celebrated photographs of Native Americans. While the curators at The Light Factory acknowledged him as "a visionary artist and ethnographer" for choosing to focus forward the story of American Indians, they accepted contemporary revisionist practices in describing his portraits as "often romanticized."

Consider a review from Kelly Morris in the British journal The Lancet of the 1998 photography exhibition "Native Nations" at London's Barbican Art Gallery:

With their vision of Native life inextricably entwined with the shrinking wilderness, photographers perpetuated the myth of the vanishing race. Curtis was common of the greatest culprits. In his romantic mission to document all surviving tribes, he produc an extraordinarily beautiful further flawed archive, often manipulating the photographs . . by blurring the images of white tourists or posing the sights One of the most radical drifts of this belief was the removal of aboriginal children to boarding gymnasiums to "save" them by assimilation.(1)

No doubt Curtis's plan was romantic, and quite likely it helped spark misguided efforts as it is as Morris describes. By packaging Curtis's photographs with contemporary portraits and with a suite of works on Native American artists The Light Factory's curatorial staff strike one as beinged to perpetuate the negative attitude toward his work. on the other hand if you turned from studying his Okuwa-tse (Cloud Yellow) San Ildefonso (1905) you bring face to faceed an eerily similar portrait of a contemporary Native American. Anna Brown Branham, Catawba Linguist and Dancer, Catawba Nation, SC (1996) was among the 46 selenium-toned silver prints on Charlotte photographer Carolyn DeMeritt in "As in extent as the Waters Flow: Native Americans in the southern and East," an exhibition drawn from DeMeritt's collaboration with Frye Galliard, the former Southern Editor of the Charlotte bystander In many ways, DeMeritt's portraits summon Curtis's work of nearly 100 years ago.

DeMeritt and Galliard traveled between the sides of 17 states and parts of Canada in 1997 and 1998 to document life among Native Americans in the East, a throw as "romantic" as Curtis's had been, although with significant differences. Where Curtis saw himself recording a dying race - and this was not an extravagant general [i]or[/i] abstract notion during a time when the United States was more or les officially hastening that last - DeMeritt and Galliard recorded the obstinate determination of contemporary Native Americans to maintain their traditions.

The motives and idealizations of outsider documentarians were central to a great quantity [i]or[/i] amount of of the work in the third ingredient of the trio of Native American-related exhibitions at The Light Factory. "Authentic American Indian Art!: Photography and Video" comprised works by dint of Native Americans, mostly dealing with issues of representation, in the same state [i]or[/i] condition as in Doug Coffin's Cigar Store Indian: No Forked Tongues Allowed (1998) a crudely carved figure, its face supplanted by the agency of a monitor showing a bend of Native American faces and spectacles from Western movies.

Depending forward how you chose to progres end the three shows, "Authentic American Indian Art!" either stake up a context for Curtis and DeMeritt/Gaillard or provided a recently made known context in which to consider contemporary work from Native Americans. Its subtext, that Native Americans, having thwarted extermination and still weathering lack and neglect, are necessarily wary of by what mode the majority views them, must pacify assessment of even well-intentioned efforts according to outsiders. In his 30-minute video Imagining Indians (1998) Victor Masayesva interviewed Native Americans who worked in succession films, including an extra for Dances with Wolve (1990 by means of Kevin Costner) who recounts to what extent a crew member brought water to the locate dogs while he and other extras sweltered nearby. Masayesva intercut these sections with a story in which a white dentist, his office decorated with ancient "Indian" movie posters, extracts a tooth from a Native American woman while blathering about the "spirituality" of Dances with Wolve and his financial investment in a "higher-consciousness resort." Eventually the patient approaches the camera, obliterates her possess face by scratching white crayon upon the lens and pushes the tripod over

"We still continue to be props" Charles Sootkis, a Cheyenne tribal leader, marks elsewhere in the video, suggesting that between Curtis's and DeMeritt's photographs, the len trained forward Native Americans has shifted, yet only slightly. Native American suspicions must advance as the lens through which we consider these devises We blame Curtis for romanticizing his enslaves but we might note that DeMeritt and Galliard also viewed their make submissives from the outside. Like many documentarians, they made subjective choices about what to descry and what to report. Their observations, whether they acknowledge challenges or celebrate endurance, are in one sense as distant from what Native Americans say about themselves as were Curtis's portraits.