Gertrude Käsebier's Indian Portraits

Curated Themes of the Collection


Gertrude Käsebier's Indian Portraits



Video Transcription

The themes that were decided for the digital project working with the Käsebier Collection are a way to interpret the more than 100 images that we have with this one collection. How can we divide them up into different categories and think about how she herself worked with the sitters?

A very formal sitting we've chosen to break up into this category some of the images where the chiefs and the younger men are sitting in headdresses and holding a variety of accessories that they have chosen to bring into her studio for that session. For informal portraits, sometimes they're turned away from the camera, sometimes they're wrapped in a blanket. How can we discern for researchers the differences in the types of photographs that she took?

There are also outdoor photographs. There are a few that—not knowing that Käsebier actually traveled west—there are a few (four) images in the collection that actually show the Plains, that show potentially South Dakota with Indians moving over the land. Who might have taken those? We're not really sure. She could have and just not documented a trip. But there are a few outdoor photos.

There are also outdoor images from the Buffalo Bill Wild West Camp, the village where the Indians lived in their tipis during the course of Wild West Show season each year. It's interesting how, again informally, the Indians pose in front of those tipis or on a horse. You might be able to even see some of the spectators, the other audience members who are coming through the camp just behind, in the background of a few of the Käsebier images.

And we've also thought to include the drawings that the Indians made for Käsebier while they waited to be photographed in her studio. There were fifteen drawings that came into the Smithsonian's collection with the 112 images that were donated by Käsebier's granddaughter to the Smithsonian.

Thinking about how we look at the most formal portraits, the less formal that we're calling informal portraits, and also the few outdoor photographs that were included in the session—it's a way to delineate the style that Käsebier wanted to capture all within the set of images that she made.


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