Desert Hawk Books

 

Red Cloud
Photographs of a Lakota Chief

By Frank H. Goodyear III

 

 

Cloth

Quantity:  $35.00 & S/H  



"Goodyear, a "rising star" photo historian, has gathered together the most comprehensive grouping of portraits of Red Cloud to date and presents them with an insightful perspective on this important nineteenth-century Native American and the world in which he lived." - Paula Richardson Fleming, author of Native American Photography at the Smithsonian: The Shindler Catalogue.

"In carefully nuanced readings of nearly a hundred portrait photographs of Red Cloud, Goodyear recovers not only the hidden assumptions white photographers tried to impose, but the complex (if sometimes equally hidden) forms of resistance that constituted the native leader's own heroic efforts at self-preservation." - Lee Clark Mitchell, professor of English, Princeton University.

In Red Cloud: Photographs of a Lakota Chief, Red Cloud (1821-1909), the famous Lakota leader, comes to life through a series of extraordinary photographs that trace his career in stunning detail. Arguably the most photographed Native American of the nineteenth century, Red Cloud posed before the camera some fifty times and appears in over one hundred photographs, rivaling the number taken of Abraham Lincoln. This is the first time that the majority of these photographs have been gathered together. These images reveal much about Red Cloud - from the height of his position as a tribal leader in the 1870s through his years as an effective and controversial statesman to his old age and death in the early twentieth century.

Frank H. Goodyear III provides historical, biographical, and critical commentary that both illuminates the images and interrogates the motivations and attitudes of Red Cloud and his photographers. What does the succession of photographs reveal about the changing circumstances of Red Cloud's life and those who photographed him? Why were photographers and the American public fascinated with the Lakota leader? Why did he choose to face the camera so many times? Goodyear provides a fully drawn portrait of the renowned Lakota leader and his relationships with outsiders, particularly those who continually attempted to capture his likeness with a camera.

Frank H. Goodyear III is the assistant curator of photographs at the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution.