Eighteenth International Conference on the Arts in Society

Abstract

From the early twentieth century through to postmodern theory, photography has been approached by art historians and cultural theorists as a medium signifying memento mori, preservation, and stasis. These connotations associated with photography emerged out of a complex set of socio-political and philosophical relations that extend well-beyond the academy. Photography played a central role in negotiating interactions among white settlers, the U.S. government, and Indigenous nations in North America. The contemporary theorized connection between photography, death, and an inherent pastness, is deeply intertwined with the histories of anthropology and salvage ethnography, which posited Indigenous peoples as always inherently outside of the modern world. This paper explores photographic works by contemporary Indigenous North American artists engaging in practices that explore the connections between anthropological visualities and contemporary photographic theory and subvert the connotations of death and timeless associated with the medium. I argue that series by Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), James Luna (Luiseño, Puyukitchum, Ipai, and Mexican), and the collective La Postra Nocha, among others, commit to a radical unification of photography and performance that moves well-beyond acts of documentation or performativity. I examine the philosophical and practical strategies employed by these artists to unsettle the restraints of photographic theory, including the disruption of archival logics, performance as embodied research, and de-centering western concepts of representation. I contend their works create an alternative mode of photographic expression that resists the specter of death overlaying the image remaking the stagnant image into a newly reembodied speculative world.