Gritty Portraits of Self-Destruction From the Reservation’s Edge

In the first portrait, photographed in 1980, Gary Charley is an angry young warrior with mean, swollen eyes, a defiant mane of hair and war-paint tattoos on his cheeks.

In the second portrait, shot a year later, his gaze is less dangerous.

And the third portrait shows Charley on his back, frozen dead in the ice of a mud puddle. The war is over. Alcohol, poverty and despair have brought down another brave.

This time-lapse of self-destruction appears in the latest book by photographer Marc Gaede, who earned his reputation shooting pretty pictures of the Southwest--landscapes reflecting the majesty of the country; portraits illuminating the dignity of the American Indians who inhabit it.

Powerful Images

But most of the images in this book are ugly.

“We come breathtakingly close to disastrous impropriety with this book,” Gaede said as he sat in the living room of his La Canada home. “I’m sure bigots will latch onto these images. This book could do great damage if it’s misconstrued.”

“Bordertowns” is Gaede’s personal vision of the tragedy that alcoholism fuels in the towns on the edges of Southwestern Indian reservations. Controversial from the outset, it was turned down by the publishers who printed Gaede’s other books of photography, including “Images From the Southwest,” and “Camera, Spade and Pen.”

“It goes against the mystique of the Southwest,” Gaede quotes one editor as saying.

But Gaede and his wife, Marnie, who edits his books and the accompanying text, were determined. So they published it themselves.

“Something needs to be done,” Gaede said. “Too many people are being killed.”

These days Gaede, 41, earns his living as an independent production manager, with films, cable-TV shows and 320 episodes of “Divorce Court” under his belt. But his ties to the Indian cultures of the Southwest are strong, he said.

He was born and reared in Tucson, and moved at age 10 to Flagstaff to live with a brother-in-law. An archeologist and curator of the Museum of Northern Arizona, the brother-in-law took Gaede with him on various archeological digs. They would live in tent camps for as long as five months at a time on the 15-million-acre Navajo reservations in New Mexico and along the Arizona-Utah border.

Navajos and Hopis

When he wasn’t helping at the excavations, Gaede would attend sweat lodges and hunt rabbits with the Navajo children. When he lived at the museum, he would hang out with Hopis.

Gaede later earned a degree in anthropology and went on to serve a seven-year stint as curator of photography at the Museum of Northern Arizona, which is where he met Marnie, who also has an anthropology degree.

In 1980, Gaede opened an Indian art shop in Flagstaff, commuting between TV-industry jobs in Los Angeles. When in Flagstaff, and whenever he traveled to other border towns to buy or sell art, he would focus his camera on the faces and scenes he encountered. Later he began riding with the towns’ small police forces, getting even closer to the violence Indians with drinking problems inflict upon each other when they leave the reservations--most of which prohibit the sale of liquor.

Gaede is quick to point out that Indians aren’t the only people in whom alcohol triggers sickness, fighting and sometimes death. But in the border towns, the violence is magnified. In from the reservation, the Indians have no refuge when they get drunk. The problems take place in full public view.

The starkest images entered Gaede’s lenses on the streets of Gallup, N.M. The captions alone hint at the story: “Like hell you’ll get me in that cell!” “Stabbed in the chest.” “Slashed across the face.”

And during the town’s annual “ceremonial,” things get even worse, Gaede said. He recounted one evening’s drive with the Gallup police:

“We ran ‘Code 3,’ foot-to-the-floor, for 3 1/2 hours . . . from one scene to another, from a drug bust, to a crash to a knifing on and on and on.”

Then there were nights when crowds of hostile Indians would gather on the streets and lob rocks at the five or six officers the small Gallup force could muster. “It reminds you of the riots of the 1960s, 800 to 1,000 people going against the established forces.”

“If anything (in the book), we played down how violent Gallup is,” Gaede said.

Which is not to say the Gallup Chamber of Commerce would approve of “Bordertowns.”

Gaede’s ideas on the design of photography books were shaped, in part, in 1970, when he worked as a lab assistant to nature photographer Ansel Adams.

Adams believed that an image makes its most important artistic statement when it’s “orchestrated” in a book, rather than when it appears in a gallery, Gaede said. The images in “Bordertowns” are orchestrated to build tension, to tell a story. “I put it together like a movie,” he said.

So, a shot of dozens of sleeping Indians tangled in a heap on the floor of the Gallup drunk tank is followed by a chaotic fight scene; an officer shining his flashlight into the eyes of a bloody woman precedes one in which police inspect a man who has been smashed in the face with a pool cue.

As one reads the book the pace quickens, the pages turn fast past “Dying words,” “He may not make it,” and through a series of blood-splattered fight and robbery victims, till one arrives at a picture of the Window Rock veterans’ cemetery. Gaede says the tombstones testify that far too many reservation Indians die young.

Persistence Pays Off

The only photo Gaede didn’t take himself is the official medical investigator’s shot of Gary Charley, dead in the ice. But Gaede thought that image was important to his visual narrative, so he pestered the authorities for five years to get it released.

Gaede knows his book makes him an easy target for accusations of voyeurism.

“People look at you like you’ve got bad breath when you show the book to them,” he said. But voyeurism in the interest of social good is honorable, he believes.

“Archeologists are voyeurs; they’re voyeurs with science behind them,” Marnie Gaede said.

But not everyone is satisfied that the book will do good.

Ansel Adams’ widow, Virginia, thinks the book will only reinforce a bigoted stereotype. “She shakes her finger at me,” Gaede said.

“I think it’s a very bitter book,” said Susan MacDonald, the editor at Northland press, which refused to publish the book.

Jerrold Levy, a professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona, Tucson, also objected to Gaede’s images when he saw them in an early compilation. He doesn’t deny that the problems exist--”What Marc’s camera sees is there--and watching people you know going down the drain with drink is tragic.”

A Lopsided View

But Levy, whose 1974 book, “Indian Drinking--Navajo Practices, Anglo American Theories,” (co-authored with Stephen Kunitz) is a respected treatise on the subject, felt Gaede’s images presented a lopsided view of reservations, where “statistically, by most of the measures that we use, the alcohol-related problems are less” than in the rest of America.

He fears the book will lend credence to the erroneous notion that Indians have some genetic predisposition to becoming drunks.

Drinking and Diet

“My dad was an alcoholic; why don’t we feel the same way about whites?” he asked. His answer is that “most whites are middle class; they can do a hell of a lot of drinking without going down the drain. They can afford good diets. Good nutrition. Medical care.”

But on the reservations, where unemployment is often greater than 60%, poverty undermines problem drinkers’ ability to maintain a healthy facade. “When drinking is taking your food money, you’re in trouble,” he said.

Indians who do drink excessively often reflect habits picked up in the 19th Century, he said. “Indians learned to drink from railroad workers, cavalry regiments and frontiersmen--i.e. from heavy, binge drinkers.” Historical accounts of the drunken brawls between cavalry men and railroad workers in Gallup “make your hair stand on end,” Levy said.

“I realize the majority of Indian people don’t have this problem,” Gaede said. “But I’m not trying to do an eclectic book on Indian society. This is a specific problem. I wanted to get right to the point. . . . There’s no sense in going half-way with a book like this.”

Ironically, though, “this book seems to cross cultural lines,” he said. “We’ve shown it to some of our (white) friends who are alcoholics, and they see themselves. Marnie has a (white) friend who saw the photo ‘After school drunk,’ and she just kept saying, ‘That’s me, that’s me, that’s me.’ ”

The Gaedes don’t expect their book to be a best seller. “It’s not a coffee-table book you pick up and flip through before dinner,” Marnie said.

Making a Difference

But they do expect it to have an effect.

“It will raise a lot of political eyebrows,” Gaede said. And that’s the point.

Police officers, doctors, social workers and an Indian writer helped Gaede in various ways only because they thought it might do some good, he said.

“You get tired of seeing children pulled out of car wrecks,” Gaede said.

Still, he has mixed feelings. “I’m very apprehensive that maybe I’ll hurt somebody,” he said. And in his afterword he writes:

“To those who see their family and friends on these pages, please forgive me. Their pain and tragedy are in my memory forever . . . in a sense, I have scarred myself with this book. But, I know in the long run, far more good will come from it than harm.”