In a fit of inspiration this morning, though I had about one hundred other things I needed to be doing, I went back to this batch of pictures I made at a pow wow this summer and re-worked them into slightly sepia toned black and white shots with heavy grain and muddy contrast — an obvious nod to the incredible work of Ed Curtis.
I posted one of these images in color on my Instagram account, weeks ago, and was attacked for it by what I assume was an angry, native american woman. She accused me of appropriation via photography which is perfectly absurd. At least, I think that’s what she was accusing me of, her comment was ridiculous and muddled with rage. Admittedly, I resented it. Her words were a slap in the face of what I felt and still feel is honest photography work that serves its subject in a beautiful way. I am in the business of illumination. I am not a new age, urban white girl playing at Indian — this is not the root of any of my work. I didn’t bother responding to her comment. I couldn’t come up with a response that voiced my indignation in a gracious way.
The truth is this, I photograph pow wows because it feels like a tiny, tender way for me to offer up some kind of restitution…to capture the gritty heart of native culture here in the West with wide open eyes and to feel a sense of healing with regards to the wounds and fractures I feel in my own heart. I am one more human who comes from a brilliant family tree that is full of brokenness, beauty, secrets, violence, romance and ruin. When I see the dancers dance, when I photograph them, I feel what it means to be broken and smashed and to still rise up on fragments of wings. I know what it is to seek freedom, to break a curse, to fail to rise, and to try to rise again.
We are the same. I grow weary of constant cultural polarization in society. There is no way to measure suffering or the crisis of the human heart. There is no teaspoon that can quantify the oscillating swirl of darkness and light that is in every single human being on the face of this planet — past, present and future. One of us might be missing a leg, another plagued by the physical memory of rape, and yet another haunted by the injustice and mass murder of the “Battle” at Wounded Knee.
We are all the same. We are broken and healing. I might be white with flaxen hair, you might be brown with raven tresses, but we are fundamentally the same.
And so I will photograph you and find the light and beauty in you because finding the light and beauty in you reveals for us all what is possible for humanity, what is possible for me, what is possible for all individual souls.
Dancer, move with joy, uplift us, raise us from our sorrows.