Indigenous photography of the Americas

Photography by indigenous peoples of the Americas is an art form that began in the late 19th century and has expanded in the 21st century, including digital photography, underwater photography, and a wide range of alternative processes. Indigenous peoples of the Americas have used photography as a means of expressing their lives and communities from their own perspectives. Native photography stands in contrast to the ubiquitous photography of indigenous peoples by non-natives, which has often been criticized as being staged, exoticized, and romanticized.

Indigenous peoples of the Americas embraced photography in the 19th century. Some even owned and operated their own photography studios, such as Antonio Calderón Sandoval (Purépecha, ca. 1847–unknown), the grandfather of Frida Kahlo; Benjamin Haldane (1874–1941), Tsimshian of Metlakatla Village on Annette Island, Alaska; and Richard Throssel (1882–1933), Cree of Montana. Max T. Vargas (father of pin-up artist Alberto Vargas), was a successful Mestizo photographer in Arequipa, Peru, who taught photography to Martín Chambi (Quechua, 1891–1973), an Indigenous miner. Jennie Ross Cobb (1881–1959), Cherokee Nation of Park Hill, Oklahoma, began developing her own film as a young child and photographed her college classmates, family, neighbors, and students.

The works of these early indigenous photographer stand in stark contrast to the romanticized images of non-native photographers. Recent scholarship by Mique’l Askren (Tsimshian-Tlingit) on the photographs of Benjamin A. Haldane has analyzed the functions that Haldane's photographs served for his community: as markers of success by having European-American-style formal portraits taken, and as markers of the continuity of potlaching and customary ceremonials by having photographs taken in ceremonial regalia. This second category is particularly significant because the use of the ceremonial regalia was against the law in Canada between 1885-1951.

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