Module 3, Post 3

Theresa Harlan’s essay “Adjusting the Focus for an Indigenous Presence” has really helped to focus (no pun intended) many of my thoughts. I really enjoyed the way she ends it:

“While frontier photographers believed they were photographing our demise, anthropologists and historians were elegizing us and tourists were buying images of us at the “end of the trail”–we, as indigenous people, were just beginning to focus the camera for an indigenous presence.

Hot damn! (sorry, I know that’s rather uncouth for a graduate level course) but she really nailed it here. They’ve always been here, but the way they have been portrayed by the dominant society has led them to what she earlier discusses as the “absence of our presence”…in a nutshell they have been here, but have had no platform to share and represent their culture, besides what was given to them by the dominant society.

The camera is a powerful technology because the photographs it can produce have the power, like so much art, to really affect the emotional response of its viewer.

After looking at some modern work, one thing that has struck me by a number of contemporary photographers is there seems to be a passive aggressive stance as to why they photograph. Larry McNeil’s work “Fly by Night Mythology” contains passages that are at times uncomfortable and a turn-off. Rather than represent his culture, he brings up the past and throws it at his viewers expecting them to make sense of it without much context. This is so different from the work of someone like Nadya Kwandibens or Lee Marmon, who represent first-nations in a more positive light, and in a context that shows their character and strengths.