ABSTRACT
The album “American Indians Photographs” includes 69 photographs of Indigenous delegates from the 1898 Indian Congress held at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition in Omaha, Nebraska. With portraits of individuals and groups, representing 15 of the 36 Indigenous North American tribes in attendance at the Indian Congress, the album's photographs were taken by Omaha studio photographer Frank A. Rinehart and his assistant Adolph Muhr in collaboration with Frank Mooney from the Bureau of American Ethnology. Although the initial intent of the Indian Congress portraits was to educate and give visible tangible form to “types,” the style and appearance of the romanticized, soft-focus photographs were, to the nineteenth-century viewer, also emblematic of “Indianness,” and thus, served the commercial interests of the photographer. The album, and its references to the “vanishing race” and racial “types,” reflects the complex and conflicting narratives around the popular and ethnological/anthropological that were embedded in both the Indian Congress and the photographs taken of the delegates. The meaning of the album, which, as a discreet collection of images, initially presented Indigenous North Americans as racialized objects to be looked at and collected, has shifted over time as Indigenous peoples have taken back these albums for their own, more empowering, purposes.
