Talking Tintypes from the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange

The Talking Tintypes project is an on-going subset of the Critical Indigenous Photographic Exchange. These portraits incorporate Augmented Reality (AR) technology to give voice and agency back to the sitter. They also represent a storytelling form that bridges 19th and 21st century photographic technologies to tell the stories of their subjects. THE CRITICAL INDIGENOUS PHOTOGRAPHIC EXCHANGE (CIPX) As an indigenous artist working in the 21st century, employing media that range from historical photographic processes to the randomization and projection of complex visual systems within virtual environments, I am impatient with the way that American culture remains enamored of one particular moment in a photographic exchange between Euro-American and Aboriginal American societies: the decades from 1907 to 1930 when photographer Edward S. Curtis produced The North American Indian.[1]For many people even today, Native people remain frozen in time in Curtis photos. Other Native artists have produced photographic responses to Curtis’s oeuvre, usually using humor as a catalyst to melt the lacquered romanticism of these stereotypical portraits.[2] I seek to do something different. I inten