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In my early days of research for COMING TO LIGHT, I had read that Indian
people did not like photography, that they believed that the camera captured
a part of them, stealing their souls. I traveled to reservations all over the
West to see what people really thought about Curtis' photographs. To my
surprise, I saw family pictures covering the walls of every Indian home, and
parents and kids shooting each other with video cameras. Clearly, if Indian
people had once believed that the camera captured their souls, they had
gotten over that. But then, was it different because they themselves were
photographing each other? Were negative feelings towards photography that I
had read really about the invasion of white photographers coming into their
community and taking something that didn't belong to them?
 At the turn of the century, it was all too common for photographers to go to
reservations, photograph people, then use the images for their own purposes,
never sending them back to their Indian subjects. When I showed an elderly
Hopi woman a Curtis photograph of herself as a young girl, she pulled out a
postcard a friend had sent her of the same image. She had never seen the
picture before the postcard arrived, some forty years after it had been
taken. Had Curtis stolen something from her by taking her picture and never
sending her a print? Or had he preserved a piece of her past in the image
that, when she received it in stunned surprise from a friend years later, she
treasured to the end of her life?
What I found on Indian reservations was a tremendous variety of responses to
Curtis' photographs. Most people loved seeing pictures of their ancestors.
It was interesting that, when telling stories about them, they nearly always
talked about their departed ancestors in the present tense as if they were
still here, and referred to them as relatives, not ancestors. Some people
did say that their grandparents had feared the camera, believing that a part
of them remained in the photograph. When these pictures did come back to
families and to the reservations where they were taken, through the efforts
of tribal cultural preservation offices or of researchers, they have usually
been welcomed as though the ancestors were coming home. However, in my
travels, I found that some Indian people did not welcome them. One Blood
Indian man threatened to confiscate the Curtis pictures I showed him, saying
they should never have been taken, that the people in them should be allowed
to go on into the other world, and that their souls should not be held
captive in photographs.
-- Anne Makepeace
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