Unsettled Ground: Western Landscapes, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Spaces of US Photography

Lecture 4: Indigenous Pictorialism

Professor Erin Pauwels, Terra Visiting Professor of American Art, 2024-25

The talks offer revisionist readings of photographs depicting Indigenous Americans that were produced during the late 19th early 20th century, focusing on details of photographic composition and circulation to recenter Native American presence in images conventionally associated with associated with narratives of settler colonialism and manifest destiny.

Indigenous Pictorialism explores Indigenous photographer Richard Throssel’s photographs of Crow Tribal Members made during the early 20th century.

Free and open to all, no registration required.

About the speaker

Professor Erin Pauwels is the 2024-25 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art in the Department of History of Art. She is an Associate Professor of American Art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture at Temple University and specialises in the history of photography, media theory, and ecocriticism, with a particular interest in the intersections between theatre and the visual arts. She received her PhD in Art History and American Studies from Indiana University and previously taught at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. Her post at Oxford is very generously funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art.

In 2023, her book Napoleon Sarony’s Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York was published by the Pennsylvania State University Press. It reconstructs the legacy of America’s first celebrity photographer and reveals how the emergence of mass media reshaped traditional definitions of art. While at Oxford, Professor Pauwels will work on a new monograph that explores the social architecture of photography by considering how studio portraits of Native American subjects were staged and circulated during the 19th and early 20th century.