Looking Through Glass: Reflections on Photography and Mukul Kesavan

The plot of Mukul Kesavan\u27s novel, Looking Through Glass (1995), almost presents itself as spectacle. Observation of its central mechanism grants us the kind of elation warranted by the sight of an elephant levitating. The unnamed narrator and photographer protagonist, speaking from the present of the end of the twentieth century, describes his current double mission: to scatter his grandmother\u27s ashes ceremoniously in the waters of the Ganges and to take commissioned photographs of certain architectural features of the ancient buildings of Lucknow, an assignment that would require the use of his brand new, very powerful telephoto lens. Nearing Lucknow towards the end of the long rail journey from Delhi and with the train delayed on a bridge high above a river, he is tempted to use his new \u27magic eye\u27 (9). Off the train, standing on a vertiginous girder, he trains his lens on otherwise impossibly small figures washing clothes on the riverbank and then, far below him, spots, in the water, \u27a man in a white kurta much like mine ... looking up at the train through a little telescope. Man-with-alens — here was the picture I had been looking for\u27 (10). But when — after, as the narrator puts it, \u27we stared at each other through layers of ground glass and I felt a quick affection for this unidentical twin\u27 (10) — he tries to click the camera button, in and at that instant, he unbalances and, preceded through the whoosh of air by his heavy lens, hurtles downward into the green river. When he awakes, abed and cared for by a family that includes the same young man with the telescope, he discovers that he has not only fallen through space, but has fallen through time to August 1942

Review of \u3ci\u3eSpirit Capture: Photographs from the National Museum of the American Indian\u3c/i\u3e Edited by Tim Johnson

Spirit Capture, unlike all too many of the proliferating collections of photographs of American Indians, is a rich, attractively designed book with several distinguishing features. First, it acts as a showcase for a judicious selection of images from the enormous archive of some 90,000 photographs held by the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) and, as such, anticipated and paralleled the exhibition of the same title mounted during the spring of 1999 at the NMAI\u27s George Gustav Heye Center in Manhattan. The NMAI inevitably possesses large numbers of famous pictures, but this collection\u27s editor has avoided reproducing too many of them. Indeed, when such images as Charles M. Bell\u27s portrait of a seated Red Cloud, with a single feather in his hair, or George Trager\u27s sobering depiction of the mass grave of the massacred at Wounded Knee do appear, they serve a specific purpose, usually contrasting with a lesser known image that constitutes the subject of discussion. As is true of the NMAI archive itself, the book includes images from the whole of the Americas, but with an emphasis on North America, especially the western regions of the United States. It offers images from all phases in the evolution of photography, from daguerreotypes to recent color snaps, with a concentration on images made during the early twentieth century by the anthropologists and others who collected artifacts for George Gustav Heye. Natasha Bonilla Martinez, in an authoritative historical survey of the archive, records the role of patronage in its formation, a discussion worth extending to patronage\u27s role in determining how Indians have been represented. Pamela Dewey\u27s brief essay moves in this direction pointing out that while artifacts were carefully identified in photographic captions, the Native people portrayed often went unnamed. A second notable feature of Spirit Catcher is its determination, in the manner of such groundbreaking collections as Lucy Lippard\u27s Partial Recall (1992), to foreground Indian experience, an emphasis found in a major recent British exhibition and book, Native Nations: Journeys in American Photography (1998), curated and edited by Jane Alison. Portfolios of present-day work by a variety of Native photographers-including gloriously informative yet unpeopled Taos casino scenes by Larry Gus (Navajo) and deliberately conventional portraits by Dorothy Grandbois (Turtle Mountain Chippewa) of student life at Riverside\u27s Sherman Indian High School-punctuate Spirit Capture. Moreover, several essays are by Indian scholars, most notably those by the editor Tim Johnson (Mohawk), Richard W. Hill Sr. (Tuscarora), and Linda Poolaw (Delaware- Kiowa), who contributes a chatty study of the large body of work produced by her father Horace Poolaw ( also featured in Native Nations). Throughout, contributors speculate appropriately on the responses of the indigenous subjects of these images. The often described other looks and writes back

North American Indian Photographs/Images

North American Indian Photographs/Images Side Trips: The Photography of Simmer W. Matteson, 1898-1908. By Louis B. Casagrande and Phillips Bourns. Seattle: University of Washington Press, distributors for Milwaukee Public Museum and The Science Museum of Minnesota, 1984. 256 pp. $24.95 Paper. Coast of Many Faces. By Ulli Steltzer and Catherine Kerr. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1979. 224 pp.$25.95 Cloth. Inuit: The North in Transition. By Ulli Steltzer. Seattle: University-of Washington Press, 1983. 224 pp. $29.95 Cloth. A Haida Potlatch. By Ulli Steltzer, Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1985. 96 pp.$14.95 Cloth. The Enduring Navaho. By Laura Gilpin. Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1980 [1968]. 264 pp. $37.50 Cloth. Hopi Photographers, Hopi Images. Compiled by Victor Masayesva, Jr. and Erin Younger. Tucson: Sun Tracks and the University of Arizona Press, 1983. Ill pp.$25.00, Cloth. $14.95 Paper. The Blackfeet Reservation, 1885-1945: A Photographic History of Cultural Survival. By William E. Farr. Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1984. 232 pp.$19.95 Cloth. Window on the Past: The Photographic Ethnohistory of the Northern and Kaigani Haida. By Margaret B. Blackman. Ottawa: National Museum of Man Mercury Series, Canadian Ethnology Service Paper No. 74, 1981. 236 pp. N.p. Paper. Side Trips constitutes further evidence of the marked rise over the last two decades of serious consideration of the history and meaning of photography. Insofar as this increasing awareness has affected our understanding of the photography of American Indians, one aspect of the progress may be charted in the discovery or rediscovery of photographers, such as Sumner Matteson, whose images might otherwise have been consigned to oblivion. I am thinking-to give just two examples-of the anonymous British Royal Engineers who in 1860 or 1861 made the earliest known photographs of interior Pacific Northwest peoples and of Edward H. Davis, who worked in Mesa Grande.l Initially Matteson might seem less important than such others as these in that he counted no photographic coups, as it were, and only part of his output, if a significant part, was devoted to Native American subject matter. But, on reflection, this means that his Indian work, represented by approximately half of the images in this book, each as meticulously documented as possible, must be seen in context