Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
Folklores et Politique Approaches Comparees et reflexions critiques Europes - Ameriques, Fiszer Stanislaw,Francfort Didier,Niviere Antoine,Noel Jean-Sebastien, Editör, Editions Le Manuscrit, Paris, ss.141-154, 2014
Historically it will be an understatement to state that the relationship between the Native American peoples and the medium of photography has proven to be not only complex, but verifiably problematic. The tribes’ distrust of photography sometimes stemmed from actual events such as the spreading of diseases after the introduction of a photographer to the tribe, and at other times as a result of abstract reasoning. Fleming and Luskey argue that many Plains Indians called photographers “Shadow Catchers”, “… thinking that somehow a photograph captured an element of their being which might be translated into power over them” (16), and this consequently accounted for the reluctance of the Indian peoples in allowing their photographs to be taken. It can further be posited that such reasoning was in fact precise, in that the medium of photography establishes the categories of the object and subject very clearly, and gives a vast advantage to the photographer over the photographed to define, fix and represent him/her, denying the photographed agency in the process.
Louis Owens likewise, in discussing the core of a mixedblood Indian selfhood, dwells at length on photography as a medium of questionable efficacy in locating Indianness. After voicing Susan Sontag’s contention that ‘“to photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed”’ (qtd 98), Owens continues; “Sontag declares furthermore that ‘in America, the photographer is not simply a person who records the past but the one who invents it”’ (I Hear 99). We further read:
… I realise that the photographer who supposedly invents the past, like an Edward Curtis photographing “real” Indians, actually invents nothing but rather goes in search of what already exists prior to his subjects, has already been invented by the myth-making consciousness of America, to find, to recognise, and verify that prior invention (how otherwise could he bear the signifiers of authenticity with him as props?). “Indians” are thus invented… (99).
Owens thus draws our attention to the fact that the photographer who goes in search of the “real” Indian can do nothing more than try and authenticate his Indians by using preconceived and static signifiers of Indianness, since the Indian the photographer seeks is itself an elaborate construct of the colonial fantasy. And when these fake presences are photographed, a non-existent category of real is established. This construct is in turn essentialised and sold to the masses, and hitherto assumed by the public to be the “real”.
Hence, this paper proposes to discuss how the artifactualisation of the Native American cultures through the hectic activity of photographing them at the assumed moment of their imminent demise has resulted in assigning a panache of definitive pastness onto the Native American peoples collectively. While utilising the iconic status of the photographic image, and its (in)disputable truth claim, the peoples are thus located at a distant and dead past. The situating of the Native American presences at a far-removed temporality henceforth functions to obliterate the contemporaneity of the vibrant cultures and the living and thriving peoples. Specifically building on the photographic images from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this paper aims at establishing photography as a medium at best suspect in providing authentic representations of the peoples but rather a tool that renders them obsolete, marking the Native Americans at the moment of their ultimate artifactualisation as inheritors of loss and defeat.
Dr. DEFNE TURKER DEMIR
Assistant Professor of English Literature, Kultur University, Istanbul, Turkey
Dances with the “Shadow Catchers”: The Artifactualization of the Native Americans, Imagined and Imaged