'Reading'+Photographs+of+Native+Americans

Did you know that it's possible to "read" a picture? When you "read" an image, you look beyond the obvious facts to find the little details that help you place the picture in a larger context. You also think about who created the image and why they created it.

Photographs of Native Americans can be important sources of information about their lives and cultures. But like any source, they can be misleading. Think about the difference between a posed class picture and a candid snapshot of a class full of students. Which one provides a more accurate picture of how students look? Could you use either one as your only source of information about student life? Do you think a student with a camera would take the same pictures as a teacher with a camera? If a parent, a newspaper reporter, and a college scout are taking pictures at a basketball game, will their pictures focus on the same things?

Cameras don't lie, but the people using them - //and// the people posing for them - can try to make photographs that convey specific messages. The following resources discuss the messages conveyed in old photographs of Native Americans.

[|Reading Photographs] - This website from the Mathers Museum of World Cultures "explores some of the potential uses of photographs as documents."

David R. M. Beck, "[|The Myth of the Vanishing Race]" (2001) - This essay discusses how the American public considered early twentieth-century Native Americans to be "a dying race: and how photographer Edward S. Curtis created images that reinforced this false belief. Curtis's photographs of Native Americans have been placed in an [|online database] by the Library of Congress; the Library includes a note about [|sensitive images and text].