Day 13: Native American women photographers as storytellers

In 'Native American Women Photographers As Storytellers', Joan M. Jensen, Professor Emerita at New Mexico State University, presents a brief introduction to the visual anthropology of indigenous female "message carriers".

She writes:

Native women have always created objects (especially beadwork, ribbonwork, weaving, pottery, and basketry) that carried messages about their communities and cultures. What we would call the fiber and ceramic arts continue to be media in which many contemporary traditional Native women artists work. This work, both contemporary and historical, forms the basis of most Native art collections in museums and the vast market for Indian art. Artists working in less traditional media, including photography, who also use their art to carry messages about their communities, have received less recognition and far less patronage by art consumers. Since the 1970s, Native women have produced an astounding body of images in painting, printmaking, sculpture, and photography. They have confidently moved into the role of photographer, using film as a medium to carry messages to their own cultures.

Jensen goes on to address how Native women "combine a search for personal and public identity" through their artwork:

Their work has formed a critique, a different story, that explicitly and implicitly critiques the "vanishing race" genre of romantic photography so popular at the turn of the century and since the 1970s revival of Edward Curtis and other photographers of American Indians. These photographers portray their cultures not as vanishing, but as part of a lively, assertive group of people confident about the importance of their cultures in the past, their importance to the present, and their influence on the future.

Click here to read the full article.