Long Read: “Shooting & Capturing”

Matika Wilbur deserves a better chronicler than Jen Graves (who, if you set her on fire, would burn to death self-debating the properly bias-free methodology in the present moment of calling for a bucket of water), but kudos to Seattle’s Stranger for this article:

Matika Wilbur is the kind of photographer who calls ahead. She laughs loud and makes friends easily and sleeps on the couches and floors of her subjects… What she’s doing is spending several years—as long as it takes, and as long as the grant money and Kickstarter funds last—visiting and taking pictures of every Native American tribe in the United States.

She’s been traveling a year so far, at the wheel of her improbable black sports car, one woman following her own grand vision. But she’s also fulfilling what really is a communal mission: picturing Native America from the inside, for the first time. She’s trying to bring “image justice,” as one museum curator calls it, to the world of social justice. She is traveling long distances, sometimes to remote locations, but as a Native woman—she is of Swinomish and Tulalip descent, tribes near Seattle—each place is a version of her own home, and these are family portraits. She’s trying to find methods of shooting and capturing that don’t repeat her extended family’s history in real life of being shot and captured, restricted and suffocated within artificial borders and frames.

By the end of the first year, she has thousands of pictures and has visited almost 200 tribes, but she also has more than 300 tribes to go and much more money to raise. If anyone can do this—and it’s a fair question to ask whether anyone can—Wilbur is the one. From her childhood of being bused from Swinomish across a tiny channel to attend a white school in La Conner, to her teenage years of addiction and recovery, to her early training and career as a fashion photographer who finally dropped out when she found herself on a meaningless and exorbitantly expensive shoot in Malibu, she’s had more struggle and adventure than many 80-year-olds. Next year, she’s turning 30…

Subjects pick where they want to be photographed. Wilbur’s only request is that the location be within their indigenous lands. This can mean extreme circumstances, and Wilbur sometimes longs to return to the stability of studio photography. But for Project 562, she’ll take the picture anywhere, regardless of conditions. To get one shot, she rode a Natives-only helicopter down into the interior of the Grand Canyon. She followed another subject to the rim of Hawaii. At the ocean edge of Washington State, she waded with her camera, following twin brothers, into the frigid water on the sacred, private beach of the Quinault Tribe. On that freezing errand, she was assisted by a young volunteer named Coup Trudell, who held the portable light stand and its umbrella aloft as the waves crashed closer, the tide moved in, and the sun went down. Trudell’s father is John Trudell, the spokesman for the United Indians of All Tribes’ takeover of Alcatraz in 1969. This past summer, Wilbur photographed the Trudells on the street in the Mission District in San Francisco, where they live…

Click through, if only for the pictures…