Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography

The Amon Carter Museum of American Art exhibition Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography provides a major museum examination of contemporary Indigenous photography across the United States. This groundbreaking project summarizes how these artists have taken over the conversation about how their cultures and lives are depicted through their dynamic embrace of three interwoven themes: Survivance, Nation, and Indigenous Visuality. The photographers demand that their existence, perspectives, and troubling history be acknowledged, as they enact a key shift away from privileging settler-colonialism, foregrounding instead an Indigenous sense of community and visuality. Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography reveals and examines these Indigenous artists’ explorations of themes like identity, the contribution of customary practice to contemporary life, belonging, and the assistance that Indigenous worldviews can provide to building healthier relationships with each other and the earth. The book, like the exhibition, is comprised of four sections bridged by transitions and ending with a globalization of the discussion. Texts by key Indigenous scholars are followed by a series of plates illustrating many of the exhibition works. Not an exhibition catalogue per se, Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography is a summary statement about the preoccupations and dynamism of Indigenous photography today.

Speaking with Light features the work of more than twenty-five artists, including Nicholas Galanin, Sky Hopinka, Zig Jackson, Kapulani Landgraf, Dylan McLaughlin, Alan Michelson, Shelley Niro, Jolene Rickard, Wendy Red Star, Cara Romero, Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie, and a new commission by Sarah Sense.