Navajo stringing his bow in Canyon de Chelly, Navajo Nation in Arizona in 1913
Available on my print shop on Redbubble. Licencing questions? Email me!
#20DaysofNativeColors 📸 12/20
This photo marks the twelfth in a series of twenty photos I've given color of Indigenous and First Nations people who lived a century ago in America
Photo by Roland W. Reed (Library of Congress)
This photograph was posed, as were most of Roland Reeds’ photographs of Native Americans. He was part of an early 20th century group of photographers of Native Americans known as pictorialists. Rather than record an image as it was, pictorialists were more interested in re-creating an image as they thought it might have been. Part artist and part scientist, they endeavored to have their re-creations reflect not only the highest artistic value, but unquestioned ethnological accuracy as well. At the beginning of the 20th century a number of pictorialists, noticing the extremely deleterious impact of reservation life on Native Americans, wanted to recreate in photographs of the native’s life and ways as they had been in better times, rather than record how it had actually become. (via Grand Endeavors of American Indian Photography, 1993)
In 1913 Reed spent a number of months in Arizona photographing the Navajo and Hopi, and had this young Navajo man pose for this photograph. If you look closely he is painted or tattoo'd around his ankles.
A few archery forums have pointed out his bow to be a Self Bow of Pueblo design, the neighbours of the Navajo. A self bow is named so as it is made out of one single piece of material, usually wood such as cottonwood, willow, or juniper.
George Catlin (1796 – 1872), the famous artist who specialized in portraits of Native Americans, noted the strength and advantage of an arrow and bow:
“When the arrow is thrown with great ease and certainty to the heart; and instances sometimes occur, where the arrow passes entirely through the animal’s body. An Indian, therefore, mounted on a fleet and well-trained horse, with his bow in his hand, and his quiver slung on his back, containing an hundred arrows, of which he can throw fifteen or twenty in a minute, is a formidable and dangerous enemy.”
Available on my print shop on Redbubble. Licencing questions? Email me!