American Indians (Lyndell Yazzie-Navajo)

Photographed in a studio against a neutral background, Andres Serrano’s portrait shows a Navajo woman in traditional dress. While the photograph’s large scale monumentalizes the subject, Serrano depicts his sitter in a direct and dignified manner, producing a sense of engaging intimacy. Serrano has explored fundamental issues related to sex, religion, race, and prejudice throughout his career. Whatever his subject matter, he always considers himself a portraitist. He has often expressed his admiration of both August Sander, the 1920s chronicler of people in various segments of German society, and Edward S. Curtis, who in the early twentieth century aimed at documenting the disappearance of traditional life among the indigenous peoples of North America. Curtis has been criticized for fabricating a false reality, staging scenes and retouching his photographs to conform to a stereotypical idea of traditional Native culture. To Serrano, however, it is the sense of dignity in Curtis’s depictions that matters, and this quality comes through in his own portrait of Lyndell Yazzie.