Trading Gazes: Euro-American Women Photographers and Native North Americans, 1880–1940. By Susan Bernardin, Melody Graulich, Lisa MacFarlane, and Nicole Tonkovich. (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003. xx, 243 pp. Cloth, $60.00, ISBN 0-8135-3169-1. Paper, $30.00, ISBN 0-8135-3170-5.)

Abstract

Inspired by a Western Literature Association Conference panel, this volume brings together four penetrating essays on four photographers who are virtually unknown—Jane Gay, Kate Cory, Mary Schäffer, and Grace Nicholson. An outstanding introductory essay, aptly entitled “Empire of the Lens,” firmly situates these women in the cultural, technological, regional, and national histories in which they operated, but it also differentiates them from their better-known male and female contemporaries. Whereas Frances Benjamin Johnston and Gertrude Käsebier ran highly regarded studios at the turn of the century, the four photographers examined here engaged solely in fieldwork, using the camera “as an adjunct to other pursuits” (p. 21). And unlike their male counterparts in the field, who projected a western frontier (usually just one) of mythic proportions, Gay, Cory, Schäffer, and Nicholson tended to fill their frames with “the details of everyday living” (p. 22). Nicole Tonkovich introduces a remarkably keen observer in Jane Gay, who accompanied her friend Alice Fletcher, a Dawes Act allotment agent, to Nez Percé lands in Idaho. That Gay referred to Fletcher in her writings as both “‘Her Majesty’” and “‘a happy hen’” (pp. 45, 65) and then augmented these labels with visual images reveals both the role and force of Victorian femininity and maternalism in late-nineteenth-century American imperialism.