DECIPHERING THE CAPTURED SHADOWS

“Shadow Catchers” is the poetic name bestowed on early photographers by Native Americans who posed in front of their mysterious black boxes. The shadows caught by camera often say more about white man’s culture than they do about Indian subjects, according to Susan Walther and Breita Mack, of the Huntington Library and Art Gallery.

They ought to know. Walther, assistant curator of American art, and Mack, who presides over the library’s photography archive, organized the current “Shadow Catchers” exhibition at the Huntington’s Virginia Steele Scott Gallery through Sept. 1. This was no mean feat; the two women sifted through the Huntington’s collection of 280,000 prints and negatives to come up with a show of 42 vintage images by nine 19th-Century photographers.

“We found enough exhibition ideas to take us through the 1990s,” said Mack, who was hired seven years ago to catalogue the library’s immense cache of photographs. Faced with a daunting array of possibilities, the two women settled on a concise survey of Indian photographs that would illuminate the transition from the relatively straightforward documentary approach of Alexander Gardner and William Stinson Soule to consciously artful portraits by Edward Curtis and Karl Moon.

“We could have done a show on any one of the photographers, but we wanted to present the whole historical context of this material,” said Walther, a photo historian and graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design who has been charged with curating exhibitions of American prints, drawings and photographs to accompany the Scott collection of American paintings.

Context is here and so is variety--dry documents, stunningly formal compositions, George E. Trager’s grim account of the battle at Wounded Knee, and fuzzy, romantic portraits. The common factor, though, is the sense of peering at one race through the eyes of another, which has already destroyed what it immortalizes on paper.

“The irony of these photographs is that one Indian is posed with a gun and the other wears a congressional peace medal,” Walther noted, pointing to two of Soule’s pictures. “And here’s a boy who has been photographed in costumes of several different tribes, dressed up in fake studio stuff and reclining like a river god.

“Even in the images that appear to be documentary, there’s a mind-set about how you make up a picture. These photographers were sent out to document Indian culture, but in a way they documented white culture.”

Nearly every picture contains some inconsistency if not extreme contrivances. Some Indians wear crosses around their necks, as symbols of their Christian conversion. One of them, Lone Wolf, is part of Gardner’s series of frontal and profile images of Indians, done for an ethnological museum in England. According to Walther, Gardner also photographed Indian delegations that visited Washington and was known to keep “a smelly pile of Indian garb” that he used to dress his models.

“I find this so poignant,” she said, moving on to William Henry Jackson’s school portrait, presenting Indian students dressed in white people’s clothes while one of their number holds a tomahawk.

“We find some of these things depressing, but I think the photographers meant to show how forward looking they were,” Mack commented. Walther agreed, saying her judgments are the product of “20th-Century hindsight.”

That hindsight makes it difficult to view “Shadow Catchers” without an attack of social conscience. The “authentic” Indian culture on view is loaded with clues to its infiltration. We find canned goods filling shelves of Indian dwellings, a cheesecake shot by John K. Hillers and pictures of Indians working on crafts that are probably intended for the tourist market.

Information about the photographs and the expeditions that produced them is sometimes scanty. According to Mack, Adam Clark Vroman helped historians by writing diaries of his trips on the backs of his photos displayed at the Huntington. In one of the strangest images, he tells of “four hefty braves” hoisting one of his traveling partners--a 260-pound cultural maven from Pasadena--up treacherous terrain so that she could see Indian dwellings. Her great mound of flesh occupies a chair in a picture titled “Interior of Our Home on the Mesa.”

“Whose home?” Walther asks wryly, then notes the ultimate irony of preserving only what is not threatening.