For a love of his people: the photography of Horace Poolaw

Abstract

For a Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw Edited by Nancy Marie Mithlo Yale University Press, 2014 184 pp./$49.95 (hb) [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] A new book brings a comprehensive look at the photography of Horace Poolaw (Kiowa, 1906-84) to a wide audience for the first time. From the late 1920s to the 1960s, Poolaw made over two thousand photographs, most showing life among Native American communities on the Southern Plains of Oklahoma. This was a time of profound change in the daily lives of Native peoples, in the figure of the Native American artist, and in the principles of federal Indian policy. For a Love of His People: The Photography of Horace Poolaw includes photographs of dancers performing at fairgrounds, young women adorned in buckskin finery parading on automobiles, and families grieving at military funerals. For decades, Poolaw's relatives and friends engaged his camera with varying degrees of distance and nonchalance, formality and familiarity. The pictures reproduced in For a Love of His People, taken along with their detailed captions, convey a sense of the intimacy that sustained close community relationships during decades of intense social change. The essays--written by museum professionals, academics, contemporary Native photographers, and Poolaw's descendants-address a significant lacuna in the study of indigenous modernisms. While Native American photography has received increased attention, especially in the past ten years, For a Love of His People is one of the first monographs devoted to the work of a historic Native American photographer. Sixteen essays make up the text. These range greatly in length and scope, from the personal to the art historical. Some of the most effective essays are the shortest. For example, the book concludes with a brief reflection written by Poolaw's great-grandson Dane Poolaw. Initially drafted in the language and translated to English (with both versions in the text), the essay identifies a few of the author's family members in Poolaw's photographs. This essay demonstrates how Poolaw made visible relations in the mid-twentieth century. Considered together, the catalog essays provide a rich and multivocal conversation on Poolaw's work. Longer essays include historian Ned Blackhawk's introduction to the dynamics of race and visual representation in American history, Linda Poolaw's biography of her father, and an analysis by art historian David W. Penney of the ways Poolaw pictured Native performers. Penney focuses on Poolaw's inclusion of pictorial ground in portraits of dancers and parade queens, offering the sole comparison between Poolaw's photography and the contemporary, groundbreaking work of the Kiowa Six painters. While similar paintings by Stephen Mopope and Spencer Asah tended to isolate the dancer and therefore remove the figure from a particular time, Poolaw's photographs include contextualizing traces that help to show how Native people understood and occupied the modern world. As Penney's comparison suggests, Poolaw's work has strong connections to other forms of imagemaking on the Plains, both historical and contemporary. Many essayists link Poolaw's work to other forms of photography, especially those of the so-called documentary genre. Indigenous experiences of modernity often included knowledge of photography. (1) This knowledge extended beyond the technical and aesthetic work of indigenous photographers to include the savvy of photographic subjects. Indeed, by the mid-twentieth century, many Native people had been photographed repeatedly over the course of their entire lives. Poolaw frequently photographed his relatives at home, creating pictures in a style that many Americans might recognize from their own family albums. Poolaw also documented events such as the American Indian Exposition and parade at Anadarko, Oklahoma, and other gatherings of Native performers in the Plains and Southwest. …