05/04/2025
๐ช๐๐๐ฅ๐๐๐ก๐ ๐๐ข๐ฅ๐ฆ๐, ๐ญ๐ด๐ต๐ด, ๐๐ฎ๐ธ๐ผ๐๐ฎ ๐ฝ๐ฒ๐ฟ๐ณ๐ผ๐ฟ๐บ๐ฒ๐ฟ ๐๐ถ๐๐ต ๐๐๐ณ๐ณ๐ฎ๐น๐ผ ๐๐ถ๐น๐นโ๐ ๐ช๐ถ๐น๐ฑ ๐ช๐ฒ๐๐. Gertrude Kรคsebier photographed several Native performers in her New York studio. Bill Codyโs production traveled with up to 600 people, 400 horses, and 20 buffalo. Codyโs extravaganza was seen in America, England, and Europe by 70 million people!
Whirling Horse had plucked his eyebrows and lashes, common practice among warriors on the Northern Plains. At age 37, Gertrude Kรคsebier attended art school. At age 43, she decided to learn photography. By age 48 in 1900, she had earned a strong reputation for her portraits. Text and Photoshop cleaning and sharpening by Gary Coffrin.
= Backstory & Analysis =
Whirling Horseโs biographical details are scarce, but he later married Josie, a former wife of Sioux Chief American Horse. The four longest tailfeathers of several eagles were used in making the impressive headdress.
Authors often compare Gertrude Kรคsebierโs portraits of Natives with those of Edward S. Curtis. Curtis, however, spent 23 years producing his monumental 20-volume work, โThe North American Indian,โ which contained 1,500 photographs and tribal histories. Kรคsebier took her photos of Natives during a few days. In an unfair tactic, essays comparing them typically offered high praise for a select few of Kรคsebierโs portraits and attacked a select few by Curtis. I see their work as quite similar during their brief period of overlap. However, Curtis faced the challenges of making portraits in the field rather than a studio. Kรคsebier did mostly close head and shoulder shots, a technique not neglected by Curtis.
Kรคsebierโs later portraits were often more creative, particularly when photographing lone women and mothers with their children. In traditional photography, there is only ONE original, the negative, from which many prints can be made. Negatives have greater tonal range and have the full detail of the capture. Many of Kรคsebierโs negatives have survived. Most of Curtis's negatives were destroyed. Curtisโs reputation largely rests on the skills of his backroom staff, who produced superb prints. You can view many Curtis and Kรคsebier images at the Library of Congress website.
Directly comparable to Kรคsebierโs work of the same year, Frank Rinehart and Adolph Muhr photographed 500+ Natives at the 1898 Indian Congress in Omaha. They used simple backdrops, avoided exaggerated poses, and featured many head and shoulder shots. Starting in 1879, Montana lensman L.A. Huffman captured stunningly candid and relaxed portraits of Native men and women, both in the field and in the studio. Kรคsebierโs portraits of Natives were technically excellent, but that level of excellence was at least equaled by several others, including some frontier photographers.
Books have been published on Gertrude Kรคsebier and the other photographers mentioned. Your library can likely obtain volumes from interlibrary loan services if none are available locally.
As always, I hope that PC users will click the image to enlarge/clarify. I spent hours in Photoshop cleaning and sharpening the photo, although the original file was darn good.
