"Smiling Indians"

1896 portrait of Princess Angeline by Edward Curtis

Although his name might not be familiar, the prolific portraits of American Indians by late 19th and early 20th century photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis probably are. Shot during between 1868 and 1952, Curtis shot his iconic photographs during the famous Harriman Alaska Expedition (see lesson plans here), a Montana expedition with George Bird Grinnell, and as part of a $3,000 offer from J.P. Morgan to publish a 20 volume work of 1,500 such photographs.

Curtis' work has been often criticized for being "staged", or manipulated by removing "modern" objects and posing his subjects in ceremonies or costumes that there was little historical evidence for. The portraits are also famously serious, even dour.

Artist Ryan Redcorn has set out to remedy this with his video "Smiling Indians". He discussed his motivation for the installation with Indian Country:

Take a visual inventory of Native images—which you can do by just running a Google image search on “Native American.” That will tell you what images recur and what images rank highest. And what you see is that Curtis really controlled, and still controls, that image. And his pictures are really good; they deserve to be celebrated. All jokes aside, he was an amazing photographer. But they shouldn’t dominate our idea of how Indians look or who they are. I think people can only process a certain amount of media. We need to add more of our own images to compete against Curtis’s. We have to be aggressive about it—my attitude has always been, create, create, create. Create more and better art and you’ll take up more bandwidth and tip the scales.

Watch the video below (you may have trouble viewing this video if you are using a District connection):

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