September 26 – December 20, 2024

Gallery Bergen presents Talking Tintypes: Examining the Portrayal of Native Americans, featuring innovative interactive images made by Diné artist/photographer Will Wilson.

Will Wilson’s photography intertwines the past, present, and future of Indigenous cultural practices. Growing up on the Navajo Nation, Wilson saw firsthand the environmental and health impacts of the American colonial project and the history of uranium extraction and processing in the American Southwest. His landscape photography and installation work incorporates Navajo mythology, depicts the toxic post-apocalyptic environments Indigenous communities inhabit, and envisions rebirth and rehabilitation through Indigenous practices. 

Wilson’s work also challenges the history of Euro-American anthropological photography of Native people, redeploying the method of tintype photography in a series of portraits capturing contemporary Native North America. His process in the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange (CIPX) is interactive and reciprocal; Wilson works with his subjects to decide how they are portrayed, gives the final photograph to the sitter, and keeps a scan for his portfolio. The result is a vast digital archive that includes his famous Talking Tintypes, which merge nineteenth and twenty-first century storytelling forms.

Using a QR code technology and a downloadable app, visitors can scan the Talking Tintype prints to reveal video monologues and dances by the the subjects. The images move off the wall from the too familiar category of Native American historical relics to the vital, struggling people who are transforming indigenous life in the US today.

The Gallery Bergen exhibition pairs Wilson’s Talking Tintypes with period photographic prints depicting scenes from the US ethnic cleansing of the Navajo people from their homeland in Colorado. The “Long Walk” was a forced march of the Navajo to eastern New Mexico, beginning in 1864.