Mary Melissa Wolfe
Published: 1997
Total Pages: 250
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Elbridge Ayer Burbank (1858-1949) travelled West in 1897 to paint portraits of Native Americans. By 1906, he had created nearly 1,000 oil portraits of Indians throughout North America. Burbank worked under the patronage of his uncle, Edward Ayer, but also in an informal association with members of the Bureau of American Ethnography, particularly William H. Holmes. This thesis suggests that Burbank's portraits were constructed, visually and conceptually, through the implementation of a number of contemporary ethnographic ideas and practices. Visually, Burbank builds on a compositional format employed in earlier Indian portraiture. Attention to visual specificity and empirical accuracy differentiates Burbank's works from earlier works and reflects contemporary ethnographic photography, particularly the "type" photographs used in physical anthropology. Burbank also often adopted for his own compositions the designs in his sitters' dress and ornaments. Burbank understood that to be pertinent to ethnographers his images not only had to match photography's visual accuracy, but also had to classify specifically enough for scientific purposes the visual information they contained. Burbank's portraits do so in that they are identified with the sitter's name, tribe, geographic location, date, and artist's signature. The importance of this particular information was derived from categorizations used in "life group" ethnographic exhibits and "type" photographs. While Burbank's labels shape how individual images are understood, they also define the portraits' relationship to one another. If the portraits are considered a collection, and Burbank's intention was to complete a portrait from every North American tribe, the labels also introduce a rational system, based on objective facts, through which each work could be quantified, classified, and compared. Lastly, Burbank's purpose in his endeavor was to preserve on canvas the physical traits and cultural objects of Indian culture for future study. This idea, to save elements of traditional Indian culture for scientific study because the culture was believed soon to disappear, was termed salvage ethnography and was the driving force in ethnography at the time. Burbank understood that for his images to be used in this manner, they had to comprise a collection that was rational, accurate, and complete.
