Product Description

With A Danish Photographer of Idaho Indians, Joanna Cohan Scherer rescues from oblivion a remarkable photographer--Benedicte Wrensted--who greatly contributed to the visual legacy of the Northern Shoshone, Lemhi, and Bannock ("Sho-Ban") American Indian tribes. This beautifully designed volume reproduces a substantial number of Wrensted's photographs, along with a detailed description of each image, including the names of the subjects, their biographical data, and an ethnographic analysis of their Native attire.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #504870 in Books
• Published on: 2006-05-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 172 pages

About the Author
Joanna Cohan Scherer is the Anthropologist/Illustrations Researcher for the multivolume Handbook of North American Indians, Smithsonian Institution. She resides in Silver Spring, Maryland. Bonnie Wuttunee-Wadsworth is a member of the Sho-Ban tribe and resides on the Fort Hall Indian Reservation.

Customer Reviews

Beautiful book
This quality book will be a delight for a wide variety of purchasers, whether their interests lie in biography, history, photography, or Idaho Indians. It will serve as a sourcebook for scholarly research because of its very complete set of endnotes, bibliography, and index. Finally, the careful printing on glossy paper of its many high-resolution photographs makes it an art book of the first order. Awards: The book has been designated Idaho Book of the Year 2006 by the Idaho Library Association, has won a Smithsonian Institution Secretary's Research Prize for 2008, and has won the 2008 Collier Award from The Society for Visual Anthropology. (See the customer images.)

A treasury of photographs rescued from history
A Danish Photographer Of Idaho Indians is a treasury of photographs rescued from history. The pictures taken by Benedicte Wrensted, a Danish immigrant, came from the photography studio that she opened and worked in from 1895 to 1912. Both white and Native American residents of the area came to her, especially members of the Northern Shoshone, Lemhi, and Bannock ("Sho-Ban") tribes; some Native clients chose to wear traditional Native clothing while others preferred Western-style suits or dresses, yet Wrensted always let the choice to be theirs. Many of the Native photographs were later appropriated by books which stripped the names of the subjects. A Danish Photographer Of Idaho Indians restores names to the photographs, and features an extensive discussion of who the photographer and the subjects were, as well as varying Native attitudes toward being photographed. The wealth of quality black-and-white images as well as the thoughtful and objective analysis make A Danish Photographer Of Idaho Indians a "must" for Native American Studies shelves.