Wife of American Horse, Dakota Sioux

Wife of American Horse, Dakota Sioux (c. 1900) is Gertrude Käsebier's gelatin-silver portrait of the wife of the Dakota Sioux chief American Horse, part of her extended series documenting Native American sitters at the turn of the twentieth century. The image belongs to the broader cycle that began in April 1898, when Käsebier wrote to William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill) asking to photograph the Sioux performers of his Wild West Show then in residence at Madison Square Garden in New York. That cycle produced the platinum-print portraits of Chief Iron Tail, Chief Flying Hawk and Zitkala-Ša (1898), but extended into the following years and into a different chemistry: gelatin silver, the modern industrial process that was displacing the noble-metal platinum and gum bichromate of period pictorialism. The Wife of American Horse sitting is a working portrait — full-face, dignified, on a neutral ground — and is now held by the Smithsonian Institution as part of the National Anthropological Archives and the National Museum of American History. At Maison Picturale, where gelatin silver is not part of the catalogue (it is the industrial silver-halide process that pictorialism set itself against), the image is studied as a hybrid case: a portrait whose subject and composition belong fully to Käsebier's noble-metal practice, but whose chemistry departs from it. The Procédé Transposition transposes the image to Vandyke brown — the iron-silver process closest in tonal logic to period gelatin silver — or to platine-palladium reformulated by Vision Picturale on cotton 640 g/m², depending on the practitioner's interpretive intent.

Reference file : Smithsonian / Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)