Category: Native American

Native American Photographs

Greensboro, Native American, Portraits
Technology has had a profound effect on how we approach photography these days. Black and white film required processing and lab work to produce a finished image. Transparency film, which was the mainstay of my commercial work, meant I had to shoot everything as a finished image. Post-processing a slide meant a lot of trouble and expense. Enter the digital photograph. It’s still important to shoot things right to begin with, but post-processing allows us to take images in different directions after the fact. Photographs can be revisited and re-processed. These photographs are from a series I shot a while back of dancers at a Native American pow wow in Greeensboro with a little tweeking from the original versions.
(Photographs copyright 2011 by Dan Routh)

Native Dancer

Family, Native American, Portraits

(image copyright 2008 by Dan Routh)

Native Dancer
Devin Routh

The earth blurs beyond his skin as the drums pulse.
Lines of light trail in the black and white and
Gray of his bustle and vestments, a ghost behind the breeze.
His face is a stone on a riverbed, motionless beneath the torrent.

Borrowed feathers crown his head, drape
Down his back like quills on a porcupine;
The sullen eagle feather perches above his eyes,
Sovereign of the skies, impetus of his movements.

Is he a son of Crazy Horse? Is he Lakota? Is he a warrior?
Look for a lightning bolt across his face and hail stones over his torso,
Symbols of the Shirt Wearer at Little Bighorn when he killed Honska.
No, all I see are tracks and claws on his sleeve, beaded totems in his hand.

When brothers are dead, movement becomes memory.
Chief Joseph told his Nez Perce, the real people,
“From where the sun now stands, I will fight no more forever,”
But the dancer will always feel the wind beneath his feet
And hear the whispers of all the tribes.