Curtis' Last Photograph

Larry McNeil (Tlingit-Nisga'a, 1955 -) Edward Curtis' Last Photograph 2004 Lithograph (Collaboration with master printer Frank Janzen. Part of the Tamarind Art Institute's "New Directions in Native American Art" project.) On loan from the artist

As an artist and scholar, Larry McNeil understands artistic and historical manifestations of Indian stereotypes. But as a photographer of Native American descent, he is compelled to confront the many stereotypes that have origins in early American photography.

‘Edward Curtis's Last Photograph' is a playful look beneath the beautiful composition and lighting of Curtis' photographs that hints at latent prejudice, and perhaps naïveté. Curtis, who set out to document the tribes of North America "before they vanished," made the same mistakes as many of his artistic contemporaries: 1.) To assume that all Native Americans are part of a single culture; and 2.) To sacrifice ethnographic accuracy for composition. Artists of his day frequently asked Indian models to wear objects foreign to their own culture, or posed them aesthetically instead of photographing them during their own ritual activities. Little did anyone know that such minute details would become indelibly imprinted on the public imagination.

What stereotypes do you hold of Native American Cultures? From where do those ideas come?