(no subject)

[telophase]

Poking through Shorpy.com today at the ref desk in between bouts of checking out the Oxford Atlas of the Civil War*, and they have a photo of a man born in 1793, who was a veteran of the War of 1812 and volunteered to be a sharpshooter at the Battle of Gettysburg. A link in the comments leads to another Shorpy page with a discussion of photographs of the earliest-born person ever photographed.

Also today, a 1903 photo of the Zuni elder Si Wa Wata Wa.



* A class has an assignment due, and most of them seem to be doing it now. XD

Comments

[chomiji]

I have to agree with the commenter who thought that Si Wa Wata Wa must have been quite the handsome guy in his prime. Also, he looks stern in the photo, but I see lots of laugh/smile lines on that face.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

I would totally not be surprised if he's looking stern-and-serious for the camera at least partly because that's the sort of image Curtis wanted. He was big on carefully staging photos and removing signs of any excessively modern clothing or accessories that clashed with his desired woe-the-tragic-plight-of-the-vanishing-race image. Mind you, you can't be sure that some of his sitters may have been playing along with it all for their own reasons... ;)

<sub>"First of all, quit grinning like an idiot. Indians ain't supposed to smile like that. Get stoic. No, like this. You got to look mean or people won't respect you. White people will run all over you if you don't look mean. You got to look like a warrior. You got to look like you just came back from killing a buffalo."

"But our tribe never hunted buffalo. We were fishermen."

"What? You want to look like you just came back from catching a fish? This ain't Dances With Salmon, you know!"</sub>

[telophase.livejournal.com]

("Them trout are WILY, I tell ya, WILY!")

[mystcrave.livejournal.com]

"Smoke Signals"? I love that movie.

[smillaraaq.livejournal.com]

Bingo! ;)