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Helen M. Post’s Photographs of Twentieth-Century Navajos
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Emerging from the Archive
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In a May 1940 article from the Saturday Evening Post, the renowned documentary photographer Margaret Bourke-White offered a candid review of As Long as the Grass Shall Grow. The volume is a compelling array of words and images that presents a specific view of Native American history. Besides its author, the anthropologist and writer Oliver La Farge, another name is featured on the cover: that of the photographer Helen M. Post (fig. 1). Of Post, Bourke-White declared, “Miss Post attains professional position with ease. . . . These [scenes] clearly demonstrate her ability to grasp the handling of light and shadow. As her work progresses she will undoubtedly widen her range to include a more precise selection of detail and character.”1 Such acclaim of Post might warrant her place in academic discussions; however, the photographer has remained largely absent from any discourse on photography. Post created nearly 2,700 images during her lifetime, many of them of Native Americans, and provided photographs for another significant and sympathetic book about Native peoples, Ann Clark’s Brave against the Enemy: Tʻoka wan itkopʻip ohitike kin he—an impressive record.2
CO N STA N T I N O
Borrowing from Bourke-White, it is the “detail” and “character” of Post’s images—particularly her large collection of Navajo photographs— that deserve attention. Helen Post’s photographs of Navajos did not play out in isolation. By the time Post took these images—traveling to and from the West from 1938 to 1942—other artists and documentarians had created a host of representations of Native Americans, many of them employing readily accessible clichés. The political environment also factored into Post’s Navajo photography, for she was associated with prominent contemporary reformers. In addition to collaborating with La Farge, Post worked for the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) and its commissioner, John Collier Sr., and her Navajo images reflect the ideals of Collier and La Farge.3 The relationship of Collier and the BIA to the Navajo people was hardly uncomplicated, and Post’s work was, itself, not without flaws. Still, with all that, the portraits she created of Navajos challenge preexisting visual representations of Navajos and offer a different kind of record.
