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Detail: "Three Gros Ventre
investigate one of Matteson's Cameras" (WA 1997:23) |
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In the 1880s Princeton
acquired a collection of 1609 albumen prints of photographs of American
Indians. The donor was Sheldon Jackson, a graduate of the Princeton Theological
Seminary, whose religious calling was tempered by a keen interest in missionary
activity. Jackson collected numerous ethnographic objects which became part
of Princeton's Museum of Geology and Archaeology in the last two decades
of the century. Photographs which depict the use of these objects and the
people who had once owned them would obviously be an instructive adjunct
to the collection. Jackson apparently ordered prints made from plates available
at the Bureau of American Ethnology at the Smithsonian, and supplemented
these with prints from the Carlisle Indian School and the Continental Stereoscopic
Company.
When these photographs reemerged (in remarkably pristine condition) midst
the accelerating interest in the American Indian in the 1970s, they rekindled
acquisition interest. "Building on strength" - the curatorial justification
for pursuing personal enthusiasms - made it possible to triple the size of
the collection before the price of 19th-century photographs began to genuinely
reflect their scholarly importance. In 1985, the Princeton University Library
was host to a conference and exhibition titled "The Photograph and
the American Indian" (a catalog of the exhibition was published by
the Princeton University Press in 1994). Since this conference, the acquisition
of photographs of Native Americans has continued to be pursued vigorously
by the curator of the Princeton Collections of Western Americana.
The collection presented here consists of photographs of (and sometimes
by) American Indians that have come to the library singly. Photographs that
arrive as part of a collection - or an album - or a clearly defined unit
are cataloged separately (as is the Sheldon Jackson collection). The collection
is not limited geographically or chronologically. Images of indigenous Americans
are included from anywhere in this hemisphere. The collection reaches from
the first identified photograph of a Native American (the calotypes made
in Scotland by Hill and Adamson of a visiting Mississauga in 1844) into
the present.
Alfred L. Bush
Curator, Western Americana [retired, Jan 2003]
Email: rbsc@princeton.edu
Telephone: (609) 258-3184 Fax: (609) 258-2324
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