Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology

I think of “social geography” as a term to describe my photographic work and methodology…The photographs that I produce question traditional and clichéd notions of landscape, our place within it, and the collective roles and responsibilities in how and why we shape it the way we do.

— Victoria Sambunaris

Her first book in over ten years, Victoria Sambunaris: Transformation of a Landscape shares the nuance and majesty of the artist’s practice in a large-scale book format. Each year, Sambunaris structures her life around a photographic journey traversing the American landscape. Equipped with a 5×7-inch field camera, film, a video camera, and research material, she crosses the country alone by car for several months. Her large-scale photographs capture the continuing transformation of the American landscape with specific attention given to expanding political, technological, and industrial interventions.

Part of her ongoing, twenty-year series Taxonomy of a Landscape, this book encompasses the past decade of work, including collected ephemera that form the essential and incidental elements of her practice as a photographer and researcher. Also featured are archival documentation of experiences and observations on the road, such as snapshots, maps, road logs, journals, geology and history books, mineral specimens, and artifacts. This title follows her first book with Radius, Taxonomy of a Landscape.

Browse upcoming events with the artist here.

Since the time I left the Crow reservation, I have encountered my tribe’s material cultural in every city I have exhibited or occupied. It is incredible that so much of my community’s history and material culture is kept in the vaults of these institutions, hundreds of miles away from their source.

– Wendy Red Star

Wendy Red Star made her first big move off the Crow reservation to attend Montana State University in Bozeman. During one of her study sessions she discovered an image of Medicine Crow, an Apsáalooke chief, in a random book in the university library. Enamored by his image, she made a xerox copy and kept the chief’s image in her sketchbook. A decade later, in 2014, she revisited this image to create an exhibition at the Portland Art Museum titled Medicine Crow & the 1880 Crow Peace Delegation.

Bíilukaa builds upon this theme of researching historical photographs of Apsáalooke individuals and material culture, with the artist drawing on both her personal collection and works held in museums and archives across the country. The book features interviews with the artist and members of her extended family and scholars, alongside new works of primarily collaged photography. Red Star has chosen the title Bíilukaa in reference to what the Apsáalooke call themselves: Our Side. Bíilukaa is the book Red Star wishes she could have read when setting out as a young artist, a book that educates the public about collections and archives, while also honoring her family and community.

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art exhibition Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography provides a major institutional examination of contemporary Indigenous photography across the US. 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.

This volume 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. Like the exhibition, the book 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 is a statement about the preoccupations and dynamism of Indigenous photography today.

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With his pictures, he homes in on the historical amnesia that envelops not just the Mexican-American War but so much else of America’s past, effectively enabling our new era of intolerance.

– Simon Romero, New York Times

There is no photographic record of the period when Mexico ruled what is now the American West. To visualize the people and places from the remarkable yet unseen Mexican era, photographer Tomas van Houtryve photographed the region with glass plates and a nineteenth-century wooden camera. Van Houtryve pairs portraits of direct descendants of early inhabitants of the West—mestizo, Afro-Latin, indigenous, Crypto-Jewish—with photographs of landscapes along the original border and architecture from the Mexican period. This book challenges dominant Western mythologies and questions the role that photographs (both present and missing) have played in shaping the identity of the West.

This book has four covers, each featuring a different portrait on the front and a landscape on the back. Trade copies are chosen at random; for signed copies, please choose either Bernadette, Dorothy, Gomeo, or Nathan below.