As We See It: Conversations with Native American Photographers

By Suzanne Newman Fricke

In As We See It, Suzanne Newman Fricke invites readers to explore the work and careers of ten contemporary Native American photographers: Jamison Banks, Anna Hoover, Tom Jones, Larry McNeil, Shelley Niro, Wendy Red Star, Beverly Singer, Matika Wilber, William Wilson, and Tiffiney Yazzie. Inspired by As We See It, an exhibition of these artists’ work cocurated by Fricke in 2015, the book showcases the extraordinary achievements of these groundbreaking photographers. As We See It presents dialogues in which the artists share their unique perspectives about the history and current state of photography. Each chapter includes an overview of the photographer’s career as well as examples of the artist’s work. For added context, Fricke includes an introduction, a preface that explores the original exhibition of the same name, and an essay that challenges the ghost of Edward S. Curtis, whose work serves as a counterpoint to the photography of contemporary Native Americans. The text is designed to be read as a whole or in sections for anyone teaching Native American photography. As We See It is an invaluable addition to the library of anyone interested in Native American photography and will be the key source for teachers, researchers, and lovers of photography for years to come.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Release date: Oct 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780826364920

Suzanne Newman Fricke

Suzanne Newman Fricke is an adjunct professor emeritus at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Santa Fe University of Art and Design. In 2020 she founded the Gallery Hózhó in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

Book preview

INTERVIEWS WITH THE ARTISTS

JAMISON CHĀS BANKS

(Seneca-Cayuga and Cherokee of Oklahoma)

Born in 1978, Arkansas City, Kansas

Adjunct faculty of studio arts, Institute of American Indian Arts

Lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico

EDUCATION

1998, associate’s degree, fine arts, Institute of American Indian Arts

2012, BFA, Institute of American Indian Arts

AT HIS CORE, Jamison Chās Banks is a storyteller. He invents narratives on a grand scale, including stories about a troop of Native American air force fighter pilots in the Pacific theater during World War II, Napoleon Bonaparte colonizing the southeastern United States, a former Confederate soldier in the gold rush, and UN soldiers defending an unknown border in the Middle East. In series such as Big Bad Wolf, Retour des Cendres, Vol. 1 (Return of the Ashes), Cibola, and Terrortories: The Frontier, Banks tells stories about different characters within a larger context, weaving together the personal and the historical by using a variety of media, including video, photography, printmaking, installation, and performance.

The proliferation of narratives and perspectives in Banks’s art recalls Jean-François Lyotard’s definition of Postmodernity from The Postmodern Condition as a state marked by an incredulity towards metanarratives.¹ Lyotard observed that the large, overarching narratives that defined the Modernist era in art and literature have given way to the Postmodern preference for multiple smaller stories. These smaller stories suggest a multiplicity of worldviews, which are reflected in the layering of often contradictory or disparate ideas in Banks’s work. Noted Māori scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith has argued against the idea that the story of history can be told in one coherent narrative and the implication that historians can assemble all the facts in an ordered way so that they tell us the truth or give us a very good idea of what really did happen in the past.² Playing on the impossibility of a single history, Banks has found new and unexpected connections, linking individuals to historic events.

While based on historic events, Banks’s work is also extremely personal, so much so that the artist describes his artwork as diary entries for me. When I look back at them I actually can tell what was going on in my personal life, because I put signifiers in there for my own self like a diary entry, which makes the work that much more detailed.³ Much of Banks’s art deals with war and conflicts, the result of his psychological upbringing.

My father was drafted into the Vietnam War, and he came back scarred and troubled. I’m constantly approaching issues that aren’t necessarily beautiful, but they are very climactic. War brings out so much of humanity when you’re faced with death or the end of a society. Growing up, seeing the trauma of war and alcoholism affected me. In a lot of ways, I’m still trying to get over it or some-how figure it out, and I never quite can. I’m constantly approaching it from different angles in order to have some catharsis or some healing process in that too.

While the work is influenced by the artist’s personal life, it also reflects larger historical ideas, such as the effect individuals have had. For the artist, people like FDR and Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin, all of these people are larger-than-life figures. They all existed at the same time—they interacted with or against one another. So many were affected by these people.

Creating art was something that came naturally to Banks, who notes, I’ve always had this affinity for art. Both his grandfather and his mother were artists, though not professionally. His grandfather was influenced by western artists like Charles Russell and Frederic Remington, and he became a jack-of-all-trades, … a sculptor, a jeweler, and he made knives, but he never focused on one thing. Banks found that just being around in their studios and seeing how they maneuvered influenced me. It forged the idea of what an artist is. It’s like they were grooming me, exposing me to art all the time and to friends and colleagues. They provided a wider vision of what an artist is and what an artist does, beyond just applying paint to a canvas. Banks describes an artist as some-one who can take anything or take any type of situation or event and turn it into a metaphor, into some type of two-dimensional or three-dimensional presentation. You can take any type of material and express yourself in some way. It could be something simple or it could be a complex, grand idea. Either way, it starts with something original, an original concept, and then the materials start to bend towards something, and you manipulate that material in order to say something in a different way.

In the 1990s, he studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), which was on the campus of the College of Santa Fe in New Mexico. While at IAIA, he studied with two noted Native American printmakers/painters, Linda Lomahaftewa and Melanie Yazzie. He became especially close to Yazzie, who took a personal interest in his progress. Banks remembers that he would go to her house, and she would mentor me as a friend, not just in a regular apprentice-mentorship type way. I learned how to be an artist personally. She instilled into me that you have to remain loyal to your professional relationships and work to maintain them. I didn’t do what she said for many years, but it resonated and actually helped me understand that it’s a profession. You have to be professional if you want to be taken seriously. His time at IAIA was also instrumental in his development. He describes the college as a rare thing. His early training in Santa Fe added to his flexibility as an artist because he ended up learning how to print and paint and take photos and sculpt.

After a few years at the College of Santa Fe, Banks left New Mexico and moved to Seattle, where he apprenticed for the glass artist Dale Chihuly. He created mock-ups in Chihuly’s studio, though he began to miss doing his own work and grew tired of the whole hierarchy. I was young and naïve and optimistic. It wasn’t what I wanted. It took a lot of time to get the job, but in the end I wasn’t satisfied. I stopped working for Chihuly, and I started working in a screen-printing shop. It was something that I knew. They gave me keys to the shop, so I had access at any time of the day. I started making my own work again. Print appealed to Banks because it is so graphic. It is about the message. You can make a lot of [prints] without investing a lot of time in just one thing, as opposed to a painting where you labor for months."

Banks decided to return to New Mexico to continue his art and for love. I hadn’t forgotten about a girl who I met at IAIA. I left Seattle after four or five years and came back to Santa Fe and found her. Now we’re together, and we have a son. I think that makes a big difference in my own learning because he teaches me things all the time. I’m continually driven by this idea of romance. I’m romantic really, just been driven by romantic ideas about being an artist and about what love is. Having a son has given Banks access to the childish world of make-believe and pretend. In my performance and in my work, I like to escape. I think it’s healthy to have that. My son constantly teaches me that. He’s constantly putting on different characters and different costumes.

After returning to Santa Fe, Banks attended IAIA for a semester only to find that being in school was not where he wanted to be. This was in 2002, and I felt like I had outgrown the place. After that semester, I thought I needed to do something new. He took a hiatus from school and from art as well.

I walked away from art for a little while, and I started my own residential painting business. I was still creating in a sense, but I felt I needed to make money, and art wasn’t doing it. Then I injured my back in a hiking accident and had to have several surgeries to repair it. I went through a whole process of trauma and refinding myself. After about four or five years, I needed to get back to art. There was really something missing from my life, and I decided to come back to IAIA. This time, everything blossomed. I found like-minded people. I was old enough and mature enough in myself to take the leap of faith. Now, there is no going back. It’s just who I am—who I always was. I think I had to take that part of life where I thought I wasn’t going to be an artist to come back to it and really appreciate it and be proud of it. I’d have these nice successes every now and then, high tides and low valleys. I’ve come full circle knowing that my mom and my grandfather strived their whole lives for this level of achievement.

In his art, Banks uses multiple media, including performance, to tell the story. Banks began to use his body in his work after meeting with noted performance artists Adrian Stimson and Terrance Houle. This, he observes, has opened a more abstract quality by adding a

foundation of metaphor. Before I met them, I did things that were very literal. I’d heard my whole life that things don’t have to be exact, but they pounded it into me. I kept asking, What do these actions mean? and they would say, Not everything has to make sense. Sometimes the motion and the feeling of something [are] enough. Being in an academic setting for so long, I thought everything had to have a resonance or some explanation. They gave me a freedom, and I started to see everything in metaphor. It was liberating, like learning how to read. Once you learn how to read, you can’t learn how to unread. I can’t go back to the way I used to think. It’s all metaphor now. Art that has a metaphor in it, that symbolizes something else, is much more poignant and poetic. It is timeless in a sense. Instead of hitting somebody over the head and trying to pound it into them, it is much more simple and more beautiful.

Banks studied photography at IAIA with Dorothy Grandbois, where he learned to photograph on film the old-fashioned way. He has since moved to digital, which offers greater ease and opportunities as well as giving an immediate result. As a teacher, he notes that his students are part of what he describes as the microwave generation.

They want results now—they want things to happen immediately. I tell my students how tedious and laborious it used to be to make slides of your work. At first, I would coax a photographer friend into doing something, then you had to buy the film, which wasn’t cheap, then you [had] to develop it. You didn’t even know if the shots would be good—you’re paying for something, and you don’t know what you’re getting. In the end, people only wanted three slides, and you don’t get them back. It was costly, but we did it because that’s all we knew. Now, we have the luxury of knowing that it’s very, very easy. You can take a digital photo, you can tune it up on your computer however you want it to look, and make it look a certain way. Then you just send it out. How much easier can it get? I like that ease because I can do a lot more things now with that time and money.

Banks now has moved toward filmmaking; he had been drawn to it previously but did not have the equipment. Banks says, For many years I wanted to make films, even when I was a printmaker. I didn’t have access to cameras. Now it’s just at the tip of your finger. You can go and shoot something on the camcorder and put it in your computer and splice it up and it’s done. It’s just a matter of how much you want to invest in props or sets or people or the story. There’s a lot more to it. It’s not just as easy as going and doing something. That’s really exciting because there’s a lot invested in there. He finds:

Film is more meaningful than other media because it really touches people. I don’t know how many times you’ve cried at the sight of a painting or print. It’s very rare. A film is two-dimensional, though it has a lot of depth and gravity to it. It can actually make you cry. It’s very personal, like looking into the mirror. We are touched on a deep emotional level. We experience film[s] individually. We can watch them all at different times, then we talk collectively. It is a powerful thing when you make somebody experience this illusion. It’s not real. It could be based on real events, but it’s not real, and [yet] people actually buy into it. They want to. Film makes us want to believe it.

Banks also observes that many people cannot truly believe an event happened until it is shown on television. It’s a weird medium in that way. Maybe what makes us human is the fire, the communal fire. The fire is the original TV, sitting around and having a story told to you at night. It’s no different than the TV in a dark room telling it to you. For Banks, making films offers more storytelling capability, bringing the past closer. When I began to make a film I realized that the camera is actually the time-traveling piece. It captures time. It records it. And then when you can go back and look at it you are traveling in time.⁴

In order to continue with his still photography and his film work,

I bought a Canon digital camera. I prefer the ergonomics of the modern Canon feel as opposed to a Nikon or a Sony. I studied a lot of the different kinds [of camera] because it was a $3,000 investment. I knew it would pay for itself because you can shoot films and stills with a digital HD Canon in high quality. I had been shooting things with my little family camcorder, and I wanted to have the opportunity to do close-ups and get that crisp quality people expect. It’s just visual language, and sometimes people expect something a little bit more of you