Images From The Inside Passage: An Alaskan Portrait By Winter And Pond

Images from the Inside Passage: An Alaskan Portrait by Winter and Pond

Features prints taken between 1893 and 1910 of Alaskan Indians, their villages and art. From Publishers Weekly Alaska pioneers Lloyd Winter and E. Percy Pond were also commercial photographers, running a studio in Juneau from 1893 to 1943. Their photographs of American Indians from the Tlingit and Haida tribes, as revealed in this striking, annotated collection, seem taken in the spirit of both popular anthropology and human interest. Together the partners documented totem pole carvers and blanket and basket weavers at work and the products of their craftsmanship, displayed in state with an almost oracular power; dwellings and landscapes; and portraits of Indians, many of them g obviously staged. Scanning the black-and-white pictures is an eerie experience, for they record a cultural collision with a hint of exploitation underlying it. The gaze of the Indians is stoic, sometimes wary, yet trusting: they surrender themselves to a lens without knowing the consequences. Regardless, a reader's encounter with the pictures and useful text by Wyatt, a University of Washington professor of art history, will be rewarding. Copyright 1989 Reed Business Information, Inc.