Early American Anthropologists as Photographers of North American Indians.

""The beliefs and patterns of behavior brought to photographing
a subject (...) is a culture quite apart from that contained in
the image''. Early anthropologists from the American Smithsonian
Institute who directed picture taking, collected photographs, or
became photographers were part of such a culture. As 19th
century social scientists, they believed in evolutionary theory
which classified humanity, including the North American Indians,
from primitive to civilized. They were also government
representatives of a national policy of Manifest Destiny which
shifted from curiosity about the native population to a system
of relocation to reservations and finally to assimilation -
separate peoples were to become one. The Photographs of these
scientists served not only as historic, scholarly documentation
but as propaganda to present a romantic view of the West so as
to encourage its settlement. The author describes the work of
William Henry Jackson, John K. Hillers, the Powell and Hayden
Surveys, the James Stevenson Survey, ethnologist Frank Hamilton
Cushing, and anthropologist and photographer James Mooney .