Revisiting images from the Navajo Nation in Arizona

Native American Cowboy; Navajo Nation

I was revisiting images from my photo workshop trip to the Navajo Nation in Arizona in 2006 looking for a particular landscape when I came across this portrait of a Native American Cowboy we were photographing one afternoon.

I remember distinctly this man sitting for the students in the workshop, 12 -15 of us, none of whom were Native American, as we snapped photographs. The instructor was addressing us from the other direction, when I turned and saw this man sitting thoughtfully, as the photographers’ attentions were off him for a moment. I had to try and capture the deep and thoughtful, not clearly discernable, expression on his face. What he was feeling? What were his thoughts at that specific moment? What was his story in the long and horribly unjust history of Native Americans in this country? I’ll never know, but am glad to have come across this image and to be thinking more about this individual.

I do think of the great poem by Eli Siegel, founder of the philosophy Aesthetic Realism, “Hot Afternoons Have Been in Montana,” from his book of the same title, with these lines that are powerful and moving:

Indians, Indians, went through Montana,
Thinking, feeling, trying pleasurably to live.
This land, shone on by the sun now, green, quiet now,
Was under their feet, this time; we live now and it is hundreds of years after.

Award winning filmmaker Ken Kimmelman made a film of this poem, with Eli Siegel himself reading it. You can watch the film by clicking on the link on the home page of the Aesthetic Realism Foundation.

I’m glad to look at this photograph again and think more deeply about this man. And I hope you’re glad to see it too.