Landing the Camera: Indigenous Ecologies and Photographic Technologies in the West

FAIN: FT-291459-23

Jordan L. Reznick
Unaffiliated independent scholar

Research for a book reinterpreting 19th-century landscape photography of the American West from indigenous perspectives.

My project evaluates canonical nineteenth landscape photographs of the American West from the standpoint of Indigenous ecological science. I am applying for an NEH Summer Stipend to conduct site visits, interviews, and local archival research for two chapters of my scholarly monograph that applies Indigenous science to interpreting California landscape photography during the medium’s formative decades. Specifically, I will consider how Indigenous peoples modified visual qualities of the environment such as the layout of meadows and forests, the control of light and shadow, and the size, form, and spacing of plant communities. By comparing these qualities to the choices photographers made as they adapted their processes to the California environment my study will describe how Indigenous science shaped technological and aesthetic aspects of the nascent medium.