The original face-to-face encounter of American Indians in portraits and pictorial field studies reiterates the encounter between the colonial state, settlers and Indigenous communities. Mechanical reproduction had extended visual technologies creating a revolution in communications which began with the early use of the woodcut (around 1461). A tradition of portraiture from the eighteenth century then re-imagined American Indian peoples for new social and political uses. This dissertation begins by introducing the frontier representations of artists Benjamin West, George Catlin, Paul Kane and William G. R. Hind. Attention then shifts to the collaborative relation between photographer and subject required by the photographic technology of the period. The pictorial contact moment was an interactive communication between photographer and subject. Hence the image-making contact moment is a dialogue, an interchange. Thus the image became a meeting ground where cultural processes were intersubjective and where the present interacted with the past. At the centre of these representations is a two-way looking within a dialogical imagination.
As colonial powers expanded and increased control territorially, changes in the dialogic relations were marked in the subject’s presentation of self, the artists’ renditions and the photographer’s aesthetics. Earlier artists like Benjamin West in “The Death of General Wolfe” (1770) used the publishing industry to challenge monologic stereotypes. However, as colonial powers exerted greater repressions, lucrative popular culture industries like the Wild West Shows constituted an imagined frontier which called for several other perspectival approaches: Lakota Chief Red Cloud used the photographic medium for peace activism and community building, Harry Pollard’s photojournalism documented Indigenous communities in Alberta and Edward S. Curtis’s pictorialism became a genre of ethnography in the twenty volume, "The North American Indian".
Using a historical framework and interdisciplinary methodologies, this dissertation examines early representations of the North American West in a dialogue as a frontier of difference iterated through technologies of illustration and photography.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:OTU.1807/44126 |
| Date | 01 April 2014 |
| Creators | Paakspuu, Linda Kalli |
| Contributors | Smith, Dorothy |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | en_ca |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis |
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