Self Portraits
These self portraits were taken with a camera of my own making. It's cheap, flimsy, and imprecise. I wanted to take large format pictures without learning an entirely new process, the result is a box with a hole in it. The images are projected through a magnifying glass onto a piece of frosted glass and retained with a flatbed scanner. Since the scanner takes the image in a series of lines from top to bottom instead of all at once over a period of about twenty seconds, any movement is distorted into weird lines over the duration of the exposure. Historically, photographers would capture the likenesses of Indigenous people as a way to document us before we were completely exterminated. Beyond the obvious power imbalance between photographer and photographed, many of the “documentary” images and texts were often posed and created by a white man to fit the narrative of what an “Indian” is supposed to look like. Well…we’re still here. And now we got cameras. That we made ourselves. These abstractions and the camera serve as my vehicle to question the colonial nature of photography. Many of the images of my Indigenous ancestors that exist were posed and altered to fit the predominantly white photographer’s idea of what an “Indian” should look like. Seeing these pictures taken by an “Indian” of an “Indian,” is this what you thought we were supposed to look like?
