2025 Terra Lectures in American Art: UNSETTLED GROUND
Backdrops as Middle Ground: Photographic Portraiture as a Site of Indigenous Resistance
This series of lectures offer revisionist readings of historic photographs depicting Indigenous people in the American West during the 19th and 20th centuries. Each case study examines Euro-American photographers of the past alongside work by contemporary Indigenous artists to recentre Native American presence in images conventionally associated with narratives of westward expansion and manifest destiny. By analysing easily overlooked elements of photographic compositions, such as staging, framing and backdrops, the talks explore how fragile myths of photographic realism shaped an enduring but misleading picture of the American West in global cultural imagination.
Backdrops as Middle Ground: Photographic Portraiture as a Site of Indigenous Resistance analyses the peculiar function of photographic backdrops in portraits of Indigenous leaders made during tribal delegation trips to Washington, DC during the 1860s and 1870s.
Sarony Studio, New York City Awé Kúalawaachish [Apsáalooke 1795-1877], photographed 1873 Courtesy Special Collections, Harvard Fine Arts Library
Professor Erin Pauwels is the 2024-25 Terra Foundation Visiting Professor in American Art in the Department of History of Art, a Senior Fellow with the Rothermere American Institute and a Visiting Fellow with Worcester College. She is an Associate Professor of American Art at the Tyler School of Art and Architecture of Temple University and specialises in the history of photography, media theory, and ecocriticism, with a particular interest in the intersections between theatre and the visual arts. Her post at Oxford is very generously funded by the Terra Foundation for American Art.
Pauwels’s first book, Napoleon Sarony's Living Pictures: The Celebrity Photograph in Gilded Age New York, was published by the Pennsylvania State University Press in 2024. It reconstructs the forgotten legacy of America's first celebrity photographer and reveals how the emergence of mass media reshaped traditional definitions of art. While at Oxford, she has been developing a new monograph, Unsettled Ground: Western Landscapes, Indigenous Sovereignty and the Spaces of US Photography, which explores how portraits of Indigenous Americans were staged and circulated in the 19th and 20th-century United States.
