Gertrude Käsebier's Indian Portraits

Käsebier's Formal Portraits


Gertrude Käsebier's Indian Portraits



Video Transcription

Gertrude Käsebier's formal portraits of the Sioux Indians traveling with the Wild West Show are to me very traditional following that tradition of photographic portraiture. Thinking about a very posed and respectable sitting by the chiefs and the young men who were being photographed by her at this time. So they are in most often that chair that she would sit many of her sitters in, but they are very much half-length images where the Indians are looking straight into the camera. They're connecting with her as a photographer, but in a way that is very formal and not as friendly as you see in some of the relaxed gazes that you see in other of the types of photographs that we're terming ‘informal.' They are seated and it's a very rigid look to these portraits.

And they're beautiful, but there's always that link to a long history, from the beginnings of photography in America and in Europe beginning in 1839 and the 1840s when folks would pay a lot of money and spend a lot of time in the portrait studio to get something that might be the only image of themselves that they would have at that point.

Moving fifty to sixty years later, Käsebier uses a lot of those traditions that started back with the invention of photography to photograph the Indians and do formal portrait sittings. And they're used to that on the road, both in Europe and America, to have that very stylized look. And then she'll take it a little bit further, but she does capture that very traditional look as well.


Video produced and edited by, Rebecca Wingo, University of Nebraska—Lincoln
Videography, Jeremy Goodman, Buffalo Bill Historical Center
Featuring, Michelle Delaney, Smithsonian Institution

The William F. Cody Archive
codyarchive.org
2013

Senior Digital Editor, Douglas Seefeldt, Ball State University