Will Wilson: Toward a Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange
A selection of digital prints from Will Wilson's ongoing project Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX) recently filled the Davis Gallery at Hobart and William Smith Colleges. Known for his uncanny vision of environmental apocalypse in his series Auto Immune Response (2005--ongoing), Wilson's turn to studio portraiture marks a career development. More broadly, by highlighting the collaboration between photographer and subject required to produce a portrait, CIPX critically advances Native American photography. Using a I40-year-old Gasc & Charconnet lens, an Eastman View No. 2 camera, and the wet-plate collodion process, Wilson (Dine, or Navajo) photographs strangers and friends. After exposing, developing, and fixing a plate, Wilson gives the tintype to the sitter. Trading the photograph itself for permission to use a digital image scanned from it, the artist folds a nineteenth-century technique into current imaging practices. Wilson's digital prints record an exchange between the photographer and the people he meets through residencies and 'vorkshops. The prints capture what the artist describes as the layers of the intimate that accrue in the process of making a portrait.' More than expressing an interpersonal encounter, though, Wilson's prints intervene in historical representations of Native Americans. In works such as his portrait of John Gritts, Wilson evokes the texture of historic photographic practices. High tonal contrast, lifting of emulsion, and rich detail denote the collodion process. A participant in Wilson's residency at the Denver Art Museum, Gritts has worked for over forty years to promote American Indian education. In addition to educators, Wilson photographs leaders of tribal government, Native artists and dancers, curators of Native art, museum visitors, students and, periodically, himself. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] As with almost all of the sitters involved with CIPX, John Gritts faces the camera directly. Like others who pose with significant objects, Gritts displays a charcoal drawing of his great-great-grandmother Dockie Livers, a Cherokee woman who lived through the Trail of Tears. Proudly holding the image, Gritts carries forward a family lineage that survived forced removal from Georgia. Compoundiiig such eighteenth- and nineteenth-century experiences of geographical exile, many critics contend settler representations of Native peoples repeat this sense of dislocation in the visual field. The work of photographers such as Edward Curtis tends to remove Native peoples from American modernity. Employing a wet-plate process differently, Wilson's photographs bring the agency and experiences of sitters into the frame. When discussing CIPX, Wilson often mentions Curtis's legacy. The American photographer famously crisscrossed the United States from 1907 to 1930, photographing people from over eighty groups west of the Mississippi for his twenty-volume book and folio series The North American Indian, making some of the most haunting images of Native America in the process. …