Laura E. Smith unravels the compelling life story of Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw (1906-84), one of the first professional Native American photographers. Born on the Kiowa reservation in Anadarko, Oklahoma, Poolaw bought his first camera at the age of fifteen and began taking photos of family, friends, and noted leaders in the Kiowa community, also capturing successive years of powwows and pageants at various fairs, expositions, and other events. Though Poolaw earned some income as a professional photographer, he farmed, raised livestock, and took other jobs to help fund his passion for documenting his community. Smith examines the cultural and artistic significance of Poolaw's life in professional photography from 1925 to 1945 in light of European and modernist discourses on photography, portraiture, the function of art, Native American identity, and American Indian religious and political activism. Rather than through the lens of Native peoples' inevitable extinction or within a discourse of artistic modernism, Smith evaluates Poolaw's photography within art history and Native American history, simultaneously questioning the category of "fine artist" in relation to the creative lives of Native peoples. A tour de force of art and cultural history, Horace Poolaw, Photographer of American Indian Modernity illuminates the life of one of Native America's most gifted, organic artists and documentarians and challenges readers to reevaluate the seamlessness between the creative arts and everyday life through its depiction of one man's lifelong dedication to art and community.

Biography of Kiowa photographer Horace Poolaw, with a study of the cultural and artistic significance of his works, ca. 1925-1945.

"Horace Poolaw (Kiowa, 1906-84) was born during a time of great change for his American Indian people as they balanced age-old traditions with the influences of mainstream America. A rare American Indian photographer who documented Indian subjects, Poolaw began making a visual history in the mid-1920s and continued for the next fifty years. When he sold his photos, he often stamped the reverse: 'A Poolaw Photo, Pictures by an Indian, Horace M. Poolaw, Anadarko, Okla.' Not simply by 'an Indian, ' but a Kiowa man strongly rooted in his multi-tribal community, Poolaw's work celebrates his subjects' place in American life and preserves an insider's perspective on a world few outsiders are familiar with--the Native America of the southern plains during the mid-twentieth century. [This book] is based on the Poolaw Photography Project, a research initiative established by Poolaw's daughter Linda in 1989 at Stanford University and carried on by Native scholars Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) and Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk) of the University of Wisconsin-Madison"--

Originally published in 2002, American Splendor: The Residential Architecture of Horace Trumbauer is the first and only extensive study of this master creator of the American Great House. This revised edition features three new chapters and over 50 new colour photographs.

This lavishly illustrated art history situates the work of pioneering mid-twentieth-century Native American artists within the broader canon of American modernism.

Over the course of four decades, Sondra Gilman and Celso Gonzalez-Falla have put together a collection of photographs that is widely recognized as among the World's most important private ones. Spanning the entire history of the medium, it lacks hardly any of the names that forged his history. It comprises some of the most famous masterpieces by artists such as Eugène Atget, Robert Adams, Walker Evans, or Robert Mapplethorpe as well as works by contemporary photographers such as Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, or Thomas Struth.

Walter Harper, Alaska Native Son illuminates the life of the remarkable Irish-Athabascan man who was the first person to summit Mount Denali, North America's tallest mountain. Born in 1893, Walter Harper was the youngest child of Jenny Albert and the legendary gold prospector Arthur Harper. His parents separated shortly after his birth, and his mother raised Walter in the Athabascan tradition, speaking her Koyukon-Athabascan language. When Walter was seventeen years old, Episcopal archdeacon Hudson Stuck hired the skilled and charismatic youth as his riverboat pilot and winter trail guide. During the following years, as the two traveled among Interior Alaska's Episcopal missions, they developed a father-son-like bond and summited Denali together in 1913. Walter's strong Athabascan identity allowed him to remain grounded in his birth culture as his Western education expanded and he became a leader and a bridge between Alaska Native peoples and Westerners in the Alaska territory. He planned to become a medical missionary in Interior Alaska, but his life was cut short at the age of twenty-five, in the Princess Sophia disaster of 1918 near Skagway, Alaska. Harper exemplified resilience during an era when rapid socioeconomic and cultural change was wreaking havoc in Alaska Native villages. Today he stands equally as an exemplar of Athabascan manhood and healthy acculturation to Western lifeways whose life will resonate with today's readers.

This volume reproduces a number of Wrensted's photographs including the names of the subjects, their biographical data, and an ethnographic analysis of their Native attire.

"The moment to savor [Mary Sully]. . . has arrived." —New York Times Dakota Sioux artist Mary Sully was the great-granddaughter of respected nineteenth-century portraitist Thomas Sully, who captured the personalities of America’s first generation of celebrities (including the figure of Andrew Jackson immortalized on the twenty-dollar bill). Born on the Standing Rock reservation in South Dakota in 1896, she was largely self-taught. Steeped in the visual traditions of beadwork, quilling, and hide painting, she also engaged with the experiments in time, space, symbolism, and representation characteristic of early twentieth-century modernist art. And like her great-grandfather Sully was fascinated by celebrity: over two decades, she produced hundreds of colorful and dynamic abstract triptychs, a series of “personality prints” of American public figures like Amelia Earhart, Babe Ruth, and Gertrude Stein. Sully’s position on the margins of the art world meant that her work was exhibited only a handful of times during her life. In Becoming Mary Sully, Philip J. Deloria reclaims that work from obscurity, exploring her stunning portfolio through the lenses of modernism, industrial design, Dakota women’s aesthetics, mental health, ethnography and anthropology, primitivism, and the American Indian politics of the 1930s. Working in a complex territory oscillating between representation, symbolism, and abstraction, Sully evoked multiple and simultaneous perspectives of time and space. With an intimate yet sweeping style, Deloria recovers in Sully’s work a move toward an anti-colonial aesthetic that claimed a critical role for Indigenous women in American Indian futures—within and distinct from American modernity and modernism.

Evocative photographs celebrating the rich culture and dramatic landscapes of the Laguna Pueblo, the native people of the U.S. Southwest. Lee Marmon is America's most renowned Native American photographer and yet this is the first book to showcase his breathtaking photography. This book combined Mr. Marmon's award-winning photographs celebrating the Laguna Pueblo - their distinctive landscapes, their traditions and history - with equally gorgeous prose and poetry by three of our most celebrated Native American writers: Lee's daughter, the novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, and the poets Joy Harpo and Simon Ortiz. With each flash of the camera, Lee Marmon captured a piece of Native American history; this book preserves that precious legacy.The Pueblo Imagination will be lavishly produced, with the highest quality reproductions, including some seventy black-and-white photos printed in duotone and eight pages of arresting color photographps. The text will flow in prose and verse from the images, setting the stage and capturing in words the history preserved in Lee Marmon's unforgettable images.