The Red Man

One of the leading Pictorialist photographers at the turn of the century, Gertrude Käsebier was known for softly focused, often allegorical images of women and children. In 1898 she began photographing the Sioux performers in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, a popular production featuring reenactments of the fading American Old West. By the turn of the century, Native Americans had been subjected to a series of intense armed conflicts, the restriction of tribal lands, and increased cultural assimilation, and many white Americans viewed them as an endangered people and harbored romantic visions of a disappearing “noble savage.” Käsebier, who had encountered Native Americans as a child in a Colorado frontier town, believed the subject of this photograph was “the last of a hundred”; she supposedly caught him off-guard in order to capture her vision of the archetypal Native American. Influential dealer and photographer Alfred Stieglitz published this image in 1903, in the opening issue of Camera Work.