Photographic Collections

Historic Ethnographic Images

Photographers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries attempted to document the changing lives and cultures of American Indians. Some were visitors recording their travels, others were residents who took up photography as an avocation. Scholars, missionaries and traders all used the camera to record their lives and the lives of the American Indians with whom they lived.

Forman Hanna, a pharmacist by occupation and a photographer by avocation lived in Globe, Arizona but traveled the Southwest photographing the native peoples and landscapes. He was attracted, like many other photographers, by what was seen as the exotic appearance of the Pueblo people. His work, done in a "romantic" style, reflects his concern more with composing photographs than with documenting cultures; nevertheless, his photographs record many aspects of the lives and cultures of the people he photographed.

Anthropologist Grenville Goodwin conducted extensive fieldwork among the Western Apache during the 1930s studying their social structure and material culture. At the same time he photographed the Apache people and their lands, and attempted to preserve some of their past by collecting earlier photographs taken by others.

Missionary/teacher Daniel Boone Linderman recorded life on the Pima and Maricopa reservations during the early 1900s. His photographs concentrate on the mission schools, classes, and pupils; group portraits of families and their homes; and on farming.

Other collections include photographs by: Gwyneth Harrington of the Seri in the 1930s; prints from the Mennonite missionary H.R. Voth, who lived at Hopi on Third Mesa at the turn of the century; Elizabeth Hegemann, a trader on the Navajo Reservation; Julian Hayden of the Tohono O'odham and Seri, and Tad Nichols, photographer and filmmaker, of the Yaqui and Apache.

Click on the following for enlarged views of these images: