Today a tourist mecca, the area now known as the Wisconsin Dells
was once wilderness--and a gathering place for the region's Native
peoples, the Ho-Chunk, who for centuries migrated to this part of
the Wisconsin River for both sustenance and spiritual renewal. By
the late 1800s their numbers had dwindled through displacement or
forcible removal, and it was this smaller band that caught the
attention of photographer Henry Hamilton Bennett. Having built his
reputation on his photographs of the Dells' steep gorges and
fantastic rock formations, H. H. Bennett now turned his camera upon
the Ho-Chunk themselves, and thus began the many-layered
relationship unfolded by Steven D. Hoelscher in "Picturing Indians:
Photographic Encounters and Tourist Fantasies in H. H. Bennett's
Wisconsin Dells." The interactions between Indian and white man,
photographer and photographed, suggested a relationship in which
commercial motives and friendly feelings mixed, though not
necessarily in equal measure. The Ho-Chunk resourcefully sought new
ways to survive in the increasingly tourist-driven economy of the
Dells. Bennett, struggling to keep his photography business alive,
capitalized on America's comfortably nostalgic image of Native
peoples as a vanishing race, no longer threatening and now safe for
white consumption. Hoelscher traces these developments through
letters, diaries, financial records, guidebooks, and periodicals of
the day. He places Bennett within the context of contemporary
artists and photographers of American Indians and examines the
receptions of this legacy by the Ho-Chunk today. In the final
chapter, he juxtaposes Bennett's depictions of Native Americans
with the work of present-day Ho-Chunk photographer Tom Jones, who
documents the lives of his own people with a subtlety and depth
foreshadowed, a century ago, in the flickers of irony, injury,
humor, and pride conveyed by his Ho-Chunk ancestors as they posed
before the lens of a white photographer.
Winner, Book Award of Merit, Wisconsin Historical Society, Best
Books for General Audiences, selected by the American Association
of School Librarians, and Best Books for Regional Interests,
selected by the Public Library Association
General
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