Communication in silence?: relational interstices in Edward S. Curtis's Portrait Photographs (The North American Indian, 1907-1930)

E. S. Curtis’s portrait photographs are problematic visual interfaces between the self and the other where the ambiguities of the American imperial psyche at the beginning of the 20th century are crystallised and refracted. Though the visual paradigm may function as an instrument of symbolic and imaginary appropriation, allowing the imperial psyche to satisfy its hegemonic impulses and to confirm its essentialist beliefs, it may also work as a dynamic locus of cultural articulation where the ethnographic gaze may be reversed -not to say reciprocated- and where the otherness of the Other may ultimately emerge.