ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that Freeman’s career forms a fascinating contrast to Armer’s. Born to a poor farming family in the midwest she not only missed out on art school training, but her need to survive from her photography meant she confined herself to what would sell. Settling in Northern California, she befriended displaced Yurok and Hupa, photographing them in a manner designed to highlight their nobility. These large size mythic portraits of Native Americans made her momentarily famous but were arguably not her best work being very much in the romantic salvage mode and seldom ethnographically accurate. The chapter argues that the photographs she made of a shipping disaster and the assimilated Native Americans of Eureka, are more indicative of her artistic potential but it was a potential she never realized due to bad judgement and poor health. It further argues that despite Freeman’s ‘befriending’ of Eureka’s Native Americans at a time when they were spurned by the local community, she yet abused her privilege as a white woman by insisting on photographing them in a way that accorded with white people’s imaginations rather than their actual beliefs and traditions.
