Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art exhibition Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography provides a major museum examination of contemporary Indigenous photography across the United States. This groundbreaking project summarizes how these artists have taken over the conversation about how their cultures and lives are depicted through their dynamic embrace of three interwoven themes: Survivance, Nation, and Indigenous Visuality. The photographers demand that their existence, perspectives, and troubling history be acknowledged, as they enact a key shift away from privileging settler-colonialism, foregrounding instead an Indigenous sense of community and visuality. Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography reveals and examines these Indigenous artists’ explorations of themes like identity, the contribution of customary practice to contemporary life, belonging, and the assistance that Indigenous worldviews can provide to building healthier relationships with each other and the earth. The book, like the exhibition, is comprised of four sections bridged by transitions and ending with a globalization of the discussion. Texts by key Indigenous scholars are followed by a series of plates illustrating many of the exhibition works. Not an exhibition catalogue per se, Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography is a summary statement about the preoccupations and dynamism of Indigenous photography today.

Speaking with Light features the work of more than twenty-five artists, including Nicholas Galanin, Sky Hopinka, Zig Jackson, Kapulani Landgraf, Dylan McLaughlin, Alan Michelson, Shelley Niro, Jolene Rickard, Wendy Red Star, Cara Romero, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, and a new commission by Sarah Sense.

Image Credits: (1) Kali Spitzer (Kaska Dena/Jewish-Romanian) (b. 1987), Audrey Siegl, 2019, inkjet print. (2) Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) (b. 1977), Evolvers, 2019, inkjet print. (3) Sarah Sense, (Choctaw/Chitimacha) (b. 1980), Cowgirl Custer and Young Impressions, 2018, inkjet print weaving. (4) Zig Jackson, (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara) (b. 1957), Indian Man on the Bus, Mission District, San Francisco, California, 1994, from the series Indian Man in San Francisco, inkjet print, 2020. (5) Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) (b. 1977), Water Memory, 2015, inkjet print. (6) Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke) (b.1981), Catalogue Number 1944.26, 2019, from the series Accession, inkjet print. (7) Kiliii Yüyan (Nanai/Hèzhé and Chinese-American) (b. 1979), Asleep in Gambell School, 2018, from the series Masks of Grief and Joy, inkjet print. (8) Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) (b. 1984), The clouds are too dull this time of year. It's late June and I'm full of anger and hate. They think we're trash, they think we're as useless as our garbage buried in their fields turned up under plow, exposed in heavy rain. It makes me angry to think about that. To feel like that. Under plow and over plowed and plowed over by machines dredging and weeding through the hills and the fields and my family and my home, 2020, inkjet print with etched words. (9) Jeremy Dennis (Shinnecock) (b. 1990), Nothing Happened Here, #10, 2016, from the series Nothing Happened Here, inkjet print, 2021. (10) Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk) (b. 1964), Peyton Grace Rapp, 2017, From the series Strong Unrelenting Spirits, inkjet print with hand-beading, 2021. (11) Kimowan Metchewais (Cree) (1991-2011), Cold Lake [Alberta], Undated, Painting, drawing, print, National Museum of the American Indian: Cat #: 26/9428.