“Any man who
thinks he can be happy and prosperous by letting the government take care of
him better take a closer look at the American Indian.”
Henry Ford
If the first word that comes to mind
when you look at this postcard is ‘stereotype’, Burton Frasher would probably
have been satisfied. It meant that he had taken a photo a lot of Americans
understood so it was sure to be popular. He comes across as a man of many
interests, with a sharp eye for the beauty of the landscape, but in business he
was a pragmatist. If clichés sold well he would make clichés and to hell with
his legacy. He took hundreds of photographs of Native Americans that he turned
into postcards and more than a few are of noble savages, Indian princesses and cute
scenes of babies wrapped in papooses. It is important to make that clear,
because he also took a lot that show something deeper. In a way he is like John
Wayne’s character Captain York in Fort
Apache: a man who has lived long enough among a people to understand and
respect their ways and mores but is conditioned to follow another path. Comparing
this against some of Frasher’s other postcards, I think these people are from
the Acoma Pueblo.
Frasher was based in Pomona, California,
and the Pomona Library has thousands of his photographs in its archive. Quite a
few, though apparently still a fraction of the complete works, are online here: http://content.ci.pomona.ca.us/index_frasher.php. If you are
interested in real photo postcards, landscape photography or the American west
and you don’t know about the Frasher’s Fotos collection, prepare to spend a few
hours looking at his work. For this post we are only interested in the photos
he took of Navajo, Hopi and Apache people in the American southwest.
Most of them belong to what could be
called the National Geographic School of Photography: the images are
anthropological and are carefully composed so as to contain everything we need
to know. The caption for this scene is almost superfluous. We can see where and
how people live and what they do. What is interesting about it, as with every
photo here bar the first one, is its candid appearance. They are obviously
aware of Frasher – he used a view camera on a tripod and was hard to ignore –
but they aren’t posing for him.
In the Hopi butterfly dance the women
wear elaborate head dresses and the men much more simple costumes to thank the
spirits or, so far as I understand things, politely ask them to keep up the
good weather. The colourful costumes and the absence of any militaristic
overtones made the butterfly dance popular with tourists. There are a few
things to note about this photograph. The first is the setting. There are
hundreds of postcards of Hopi dancers floating about, most showing the tourists
and reservation police, or some background detail that makes it apparent who
the dance is being performed for. We can’t be so sure with this scene. The
people are stationary so we could assume they are waiting for the performance
to start but, like all the best National Geographic photos, we could be looking
at an actual performance; one the tourists don’t get to see.
I could be reading too much into this
photo but the way the man on the far left looks away at something off camera,
breaks up the pattern. It suggests these people aren’t posing for Frasher.
I like the boy sitting down at the front
too. The scan at the Frasher Collection (search under ‘butterfly’) is clearer.
He looks decidedly bored.
So far as is known, the Navajo have
lived in Canyon de Chelly since the 14th century. There were others
before them but the records are hazy. From the 1860s onwards the U.S Government
did its best to drive the Navajo out. The most notorious effort was a massacre
led by that hero of American popular culture, Kit Carson, in 1864. In 1931
Canyon de Chelly was declared a national park under the jurisdiction of the
Navajo nation. To Washington’s credit, it would be another 50 years before
Australia framed legislation that gave its indigenous inhabitants similar
rights over their traditional land. Thanks to the Pomona Library’s Frasher
Collection, we can date this postcard to 1935, when the Canyon was under Navajo
control, and that would suggest this man in one of the official guides, without
which outsiders weren’t permitted to enter the area.
It’s a good photo, not a great one, but
what gives it particular interest is the comparison …
… To this one. Look at the different
postures of the riders, how this boy leans forward, tense and uncertain about
the photographer. It is dated 1936 in the Frasher archives. Referring back to
John Wayne and Fort Apache, which
came out in 1948: for those of us who grew up watching Native Americans being
played by Anthony Quinn (Mexican), Michael Ansara (Syrian) and Michael Pate
(Australian), it was a genuine shock to see Apaches played by actual Apaches
and Navajos by Navajos. We can read an arc of redemption in Johns Ford and
Wayne, from their 1930s films where Native Americans are not much more than
bloodthirsty hoodlums on horseback to Fort
Apache, where the disgust at their treatment by government agents and the
cavalry is apparent. And this was twenty years before the civil rights movement,
when it became easy to depict Wayne as a right wing gun nut. All this to wonder
if the man in this photo may have played an extra in Ford’s films, and was
Frasher like Ford and Wayne a man who saw enough to read the lies in the myth?
Which brings us to this image and a
scene that speaks of acute poverty, dispossession and desolation; to us anyway.
Was that what Frasher saw? Bear in mind that in the 1930s postcard
photographers sought the positive, beautiful and exotic in their images and to
a lot of Americans the original inhabitants were exotic. If you lived in New
York or Chicago for example, the chances of meeting a Native American who still
lived by traditional ways were unlikely unless you travelled to the southwest. This
didn’t mean New Yorkers had no idea what was going on in Arizona but they might
have preferred the image at the top of the post to this one.
Consider the caption: “Arizona Apaches”.
There is another version of this postcard that says it was taken “North of Hwy
70 between Globe and Stafford”. That places it just west of Phoenix and
something in the phrasing suggests that Frasher was driving along the highway
when he saw the couple and pulled over to take a photo. It is possible that he saw them as
exotic examples of the original America and examples of social neglect and
thought that customers would want postcards of ‘real’ Apaches as opposed to
stereotypes. This was taken in the 1930s, when the closest contact most
Americans had with Apaches was on the cinema screen. You’ll notice the couple
don’t look pleased to be having their photo taken but they aren’t resisting. It
is possible that Frasher knew enough of the Apache language to be able to
approach them.
The final image was taken in 1936. There
are two other postcards in the Pomona collection showing the same two women at
this event. The scene is full of detail, and carefully composed so the
telephone pole isolates the man from the women, but it doesn’t tell us much.
They could be at a rodeo, a tribal meeting or a market.
Whether you think Frasher’s photos of
Native Americans are his best work depends upon your preference though several
of these would be among his best photos of Native Americans. They don’t
challenge any photographic rules and they conform to a safe idea of how
indigenous people should be depicted, but placed against the great mass of
postcard portraits and tourist scenes available they have a candour other
photographers avoided. The language in his captions belongs to the 1930s but most
of these are studies of people, not types.
 |
| ALONG THE NAVAJO TRAIL |
lavlps
ReplyDelete