Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography

I do not make work about Filipino identity; I make work about the white gaze, and those are two totally different things.

— Stephanie Syjuco

The Unruly Archive is Syjuco’s first monograph, weaving together her research-based practice with a substantial array of visual source material. Bound in a unique format with different types of paper, the pages are cut and layered to simulate the process of physically excavating folders in an archive. In Syjuco’s own words, the book is "a type of forensics...what it is like to piece together a vision of an entire country and people—the Philippines, Filipinos, and by extension, Filipinx Americans—through the lens of the American colonial archive."

By examining the blind spots, holes, and fragments of these collections, she examines the ways photography, anthropology, and national archives produce and proliferate images of exclusion and cultural Othering. Using techniques of layering, blocking, digital manipulation, pixelating, blowing up, and taping together, the artist’s work ultimately seeks to “talk back” to the archive and find agency in challenging its images.

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.

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.

Landscape, culture, and re-photography in Eadweard Muybridge’s illustrations of Central America

Photographs by Byron Wolfe and Scott Brady

Hardcover with booklet
12.25 x 10.25 inches
228 pages / 130 images

Trade ISBN: 9781942185147
Signed ISBN: 9781955161633

Co-published with Temple University Press