Title: Beyond the Reach of Time and Change: Native American Reflections on the Frank A. Rinehart Photograph Collection
Abstract: Beyond the Reach of Time and Change: Native American Reflections on the Frank A. Rinehart Photograph Collection. Edited by Simon J. Ortiz. (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 172, photographs, index of illustrations. $50.00 cloth, $24.95 paper); The Corporeal Image: Film, Ethnography, and the Senses. By David MacDougall. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006. Pp. xiv + 312, acknowledgments, introduction, photographs, illustrations, notes, filmography, bibliography, index. $59.50 cloth, $19.95 paper) The cover illustration for Spirit Capture: Photographs from the National Museum of the American (Johnson 1998) depicts thirteen members of the Oneida tribe gathered for a family portrait. Taken by an unnamed photographer, the image seems unremarkable until closer inspection reveals why it was selected for the cover. Among the faces arranged for the camera is one that has already been photographed-a framed picture, propped up in a window frame, of a young, well-dressed man hovering literally and figuratively above twelve people who were alive when the shutter closed. It is a telling image, the more so since there is no reason to think its conjunction of animate and inanimate subjects is merely or primarily clever. We are given to reflect, as the book's editor, Tim Johnson, no doubt wishes, on the value assigned to the portrait already taken. Turning to Johnson's introduction, we learn that the family picture was taken in 1907, and realize that by even that early date in the history of the medium the photograph had already found not only a place of importance, but a symbolic utility-an ability to stand in for a member not present. This picture is an example of the historical phenomenon that attracts the attention of our two very different writers-David MacDougall, author of The Corporeal Image, an American-born documentary filmmaker who teaches in Australia; and Simon J. Ortiz, editor of Beyond the Reach of Time and Change, a native of Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico and a writer and poet whose work draws from and addresses his native community. The historical phenomenon they both treat is photography-signal of an irretrievable moment and creation of a new, unpredictable thing. Photography becomes for them a text that summons a rich variety of histories: public and private, corporate and corporeal, as particular as a single postcard and as pervasive as the myth of the vanishing wilderness. Beyond the Reach of Time and Change: Native American Reflections on the Frank A. Rinehart Photograph Collection represents the fruits of ongoing archival work on photographs at Haskell Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. Frank A. Rinehart, as official photographer for the 1898 Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska, was contracted to take portraits of delegates from thirty-five tribes in an Congress. The 101 photographs in the exhibit and book are selections from pictures he made of representatives from twenty-seven of them. With the exception of one photograph of the Indian Congress Parade, the last image in the book, the images presented in Beyond the Reach of Time and Change provide little visual information about the unusual circumstances in which they were taken. A handful depict individuals and small groups of adults in front of dwellings constructed by tribal groups at the Congress; the rest are largely studio-style portraits, about a third of which are full-figure. The documentary value of the photographs presented in Beyond the Reach of Time and Change, including the image of Little Cloud (Winnebago) on the book's cover, as representative of the larger collection, is significant, as attested by several of the fourteen authors who contribute brief essays to the volume. What the book really says, plainly most of the time, is that there is little congruence between the photographic history made of Native peoples and the flow of events actually experienced by them. …
Publication Year: 2007
Publication Date: 2007-07-01
Language: en
Type: article
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