How Photography Shapes Our View of Native Americans
June 14, 2017
Using an early photographic process, one photographer hopes to draw a line connecting what happened to the Dakota people in Mankato, Minnesota, 155 years ago and what is happening today to the Dakota/Lakota standing up to a $3.7 billion crude oil pipeline.
Photographer Shane Balkowitsch’s warehouse is large and dark, except for a few windows filtering the natural light. His studio, in the industrial building where he also runs a medi-cal supplies business near the Bismarck, North Dakota, airport, is lit by lamps that beckon like a bright jewel box. Workers shift merchandise around his photo lab and racks of period clothing as we enter. In his office, Balkowitsch, 47, shows us the glass plate images he creates through an antique technique called ambrotype photography. Image-makers in the 19th century used the wet plate method to capture a ghostly negative on glass. Balkowitsch uses the same tools today.
“I don’t consider myself a photographer,” he says, “I consider myself an image-maker. I never took the classes, I read from historic manuals. I’m completely self-taught.”
