The Brooklyn Rail

One of the most perennial problems in the history of documentary photography is how to make sense of the relationship between the photographer and their subjects who belong to a different community or social group. This is not, of course, an uncommon occurrence; there is no shortage, for example, of white photographers taking pictures of people of color, or of men documenting women sex workers. While uneven power dynamics are arguably intrinsic to the photographic act and its aftermath, scholars and critics have done a lot of handwringing over the past few decades, addressing questions of the subjects’ agency and participation, the photographer’s depth of research and level of embeddedness in a community, the work’s caliber and sensitivity, the project’s duration, and long-term outcomes, among other important considerations. Frankly, this literature can be a bit tedious and heavy-handed; it is often invested in canceling a canonical figure or propping someone up as a good and progressive example, worthy of emulation. But takedowns and apologias don’t necessarily teach us anything new. In fact, they can even reproduce some of the more toxic and narrow-minded tendencies of art-historical writing.

While Louise Siddons’s academic monograph Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon: Laura Gilpin, Queerness, and Navajo Sovereignty falls into the category of hearty endorsement, it does more than offer a case study of an outstanding documentary photography project. Rigorously researched and readable, the book recontextualizes Gilpin’s photographs of the Navajo (Diné) people and land, an extensive body of work that began in 1931 and culminated in her monumental 1968 book The Enduring Navaho. Weaving together new archival findings, skillful visual analyses, and cultural theory from queer and Indigenous studies, Siddons recuperates Gilpin’s lesbian identity—something previous scholars blotted out—and argues for its significance to her understanding of Navajo politics and photographic practice. In 1930, Gilpin, a white Colorado Springs-born fine arts photographer who had trained in New York and worked in Europe, partially moved to Red Rock, Arizona in the Navajo Nation, where her life partner, Elizabeth Forster, had taken a job as a nurse. After World War II, the couple relocated to Santa Fe, where they lived openly together until their deaths in the 1970s.

Throughout these decades, Siddons demonstrates, they cultivated strong relationships with numerous Navajo individuals and groups, actively contributing to the larger community as business owners, activists, and educators. The Enduring Navaho, which encompasses over two hundred images and a lengthy text by the photographer, was thus the result of more than thirty years of discussion, collaboration, learning, care, and politicization. In addition to chronicling this project, Siddons assiduously emphasizes how Gilpin and Forster, as queer women living in a patriarchal and homophobic world, saw affinities with disenfranchised Native Americans and drew on their relative privilege and accessible forms of institutional power to advocate on their behalf and with them. Photographing was one of Gilpin’s strategies for grappling with and combatting the state oppression and violence. “Good pictures are a strong weapon,” she wrote to Sam Ahkeah, the chairman of the Navajo Tribal Council, in 1954, and this simple remark, which inspired this book’s title, encapsulates her decolonial aspirations.

In the history of photography, Gilpin is well-known for her stunning Southwestern landscapes and dignified Native American portraiture, but her work has been relatively marginalized compared to that of some of her male counterparts. Arising from personal connections and a deep commitment to Navajo sovereignty and modernization, her project contrasts acutely with those of celebrated settler-colonial photographers of the American West, including Edward Curtis and William Henry Jackson, whose romanticizing depictions fortified stereotypes of the “vanishing Indian.” Gilpin, Siddons convincingly shows, was neither cultural tourist nor salvage anthropologist, and her oeuvre was, and continues to be, regarded in a positive light by Navajo community members, in part because there are no equivalently sizable and magnificent mid-century public archives by Diné photographers.

Instead of downplaying her admiration for Gilpin, Siddons, who likewise identifies as a non-Native lesbian, is refreshingly in touch with and vocal about her own subjectivity. “I can still remember the first time I touched Gilpin’s love letters,” she writes about her experience doing archival research in her papers at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art. “We want to feel our objects of study—and perhaps we want them to feel us in return.” Siddons also acknowledges how this book methodologically draws inspiration from Gilpin’s life and work. In a way slightly reminiscent of how Gilpin sought feedback and conversation with the people she photographed, Siddons foregrounds the perspectives of contemporary Indigenous scholars, activists, and artists—especially queer ones—including Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, Jolene Nenibah Yazzie, and Manny Loley. These thinkers and others, for instance, guide Siddons in identifying a key criticism of The Enduring Navaho: its lack of attention to the queer Diné experience.

Ultimately, Siddons seeks to formulate a “new structural model for theorizing intersectionality in terms of ally politics that has application far beyond the specific site of the ancestral Navajo homeland, Diné Bikeyah.” Indeed, this book is an excellent example of an intersectional art-historical monograph, impressive for its incredibly productive dialogue between queer and Indigenous studies. Because the history of photography needs more nuanced, critical languages for documentary work across lines of difference, this book provides something of a methodological toolbox.