Exhibition offers a portrait of the Native American

By Rebecca Sloan

entertainment@vindy.com

YOUNGSTOWN

Their faces are worth a thousand words and tell stories of a legendary past and a poignant present.

Some are bronze-skinned and smiling; others are somber and reflective.

Some wear traditional beaded garb, and others boast trendy, modern fashions.

Many times, their traditional clothing and slick accessories collide to cleverly illustrate the straddling of two cultures — the ancient sphere of Native American lore and the modern sphere of life on a North Dakota reservation.

They are 21st-century Native Americans, and celebrated portrait photographer Herbert Ascherman has captured their spirits and their stories with an old-fashioned large-format camera.

The captivating results are on display at The Butler Institute of American Art through March 6.

Of the exhibit, which is titled simply Native Americans, Butler Director Louis Zona said, “These works brilliantly convey the Native Americans’ cultural change yet their attachment to their Indian roots. These works are also a perfect complement to our permanent Western painting collection that has a strong focus on Native American portraits.”

Zona praised Ascherman’s use of an old-fashioned, large-format camera and the platinum printing process to document his subjects — both male and female, young and old — who hail from the Three Affiliated Tribes of Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota.

“This is a 19th-century photography method that produces images with a very rich quality and depth,” Zona said. “The prints are produced on paper coated with platinum, exposed the old-fashioned way and will last a very long time.”

Ascherman, who is from Cleveland and has been a professional portraitist for 35 years, said he prefers large- format photography over digital technology.

“There is a new class of alternative photographers and printers who are resurrecting the 19th-century processes and using them with contemporary vision,” he said. “Working with a large format immediately sets the tone for ‘serious’ photography. I am not just another tourist taking snapshots. The prominence of the large format, the slow shutter speed, the act of physically posing breeds intimacy, mutual respect and trust.”

Ascherman hopes his work will make a contemporary document of both the casual and formal look of a small segment of the Plains Indian population.

“I am not here to exploit — as many have done in the past — but to work within their community to create a viable photographic document of who they are today,” Ascherman said. “You have to take into context that in the past 160 or so years, there have been over 550 treaties between the U.S. Government and the various Indian nations. Every single one of them has been broken or violated by the U.S. Government. Native Americans are our indigenous peoples. They have been consistently destroyed, slaughtered, religiously converted and in general abused by the white society at large. Within their community, diabetes and alcoholism is rampant, as are numerous other social ills. But despite the abuse that has been heaped upon them by white America, they maintain strong personal and tribal ties to their traditions, histories and family units.”

Ascherman’s Native American collection has been designated as one of the “Best of the American Society of Media Photographers,” which is an international organization of industry professionals comprising more than 5,000 members worldwide. Ascherman’s portfolio was one of the chosen few selected from more than 200 submissions.

Ascherman also plans to donate a series of about 50 prints to the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington. These images will help update the museum’s collection of more than 325,000 photographs.

Some of the images he plans to donate are currently displayed at The Butler.

Ascherman said he has long been interested in Native American culture and history, and his photographs are the result of four months spent at Fort Berthold Reservation during the summer of 2010.

“I’ve always had a fascination for the Native American communities in this country. Coming from a strong Jewish background, I have an affinity for peoples who have been abused by society at large with whom they really want to live in partnership,” he said.

Ascherman added that he has been planning this project for a long time.

“It comes under the heading of those projects I always wanted to undertake but never had the time to do,” he said. “I worked commercially for 34 years. I finally got to the point where I had had enough of the commercial and social markets and wanted time to work on projects of my own making. I quit the commercial arena in April 2008 and have been engrossed in my personal work since then.”

Ascherman is internationally recognized for his photographs of people in creative, commercial and social settings.

For 20 years he was the portrait photographer for the Cleveland Orchestra, and in 1986 he photographed and interviewed 50 Cleveland holocaust survivors, righteous gentiles, camp liberators and children of survivors for a project titled 50 Faces, the Holocaust Remembered. The project was shown throughout the United States.

Ascherman has also donated more than 1,100 prints of nudes, exotic and erotic images to Kinsey Institute’s collection in Bloomington, Ind.

Ascherman hopes his Native American photographs will also enlighten, educate and inspire audiences.

“Each image has a different character to it. As a diamond has 54 facets, each of these images portrays a different aspect of the total ‘look’ of the Indian community,” he said.

Ascherman holds a special respect for the Native American veterans and soldiers he has photographed.

“They are regarded as the modern day warriors. There is tremendous respect for them within the Indian communities. Despite the abuse they have suffered at the hands of the U.S. and state governments, they are among the proudest Americans this country has ever produced. I think they would want the rest of the country to know their undying devotion to the United States,” he said.

In a special gesture of mutual respect and devotion, a tribal elder gave him Ascherman an honorary Native American name during a private naming ceremony in August.

During the ceremony Ascherman said he was anointed with water carried from a hallowed spring high in the Colorado Rockies and touched on the head and shoulders with a sacred eagle feather.

The tribal elder explained that the sun is the giver of all life, and since the camera uses the sun, Ascherman’s name would be Captures the Light.

“We parted as brothers,” he recalled. “It was an extremely emotional occasion and I was much subdued for the remainder of the day.”

After its time at The Butler, Ascherman’s Native American exhibit will be displayed at the Taube Museum of Art in Minot, ND, and at the International Paris Photo Exhibition of 2012, to name a few.