An Uneasy Balance Between Native Americans and the Photographer
Updated: Sep 10
Around 1914, Jesse L. Nusbaum photographed a woman and child at Jemez Pueblo in New Mexico. The child smiles from the woman’s back while she looks toward the camera. More than a century later, the photograph still feels immediate. We can see their clothing, their expressions, and the closeness between them, but we do not know their names.
The image is preserved in the historical record as “Unidentified woman and child, Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico.” Nusbaum’s name, on the other hand, is well known. His work in photography, archaeology, and historic preservation was carefully documented, and his career would later include Mesa Verde National Park and the National Park Service. The contrast is difficult to ignore: we know a great deal about the man behind the camera and very little about the two people standing in front of it.
How Photography Shaped the Story
By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photographs had become one of the main ways non-Native Americans saw Indigenous people. Images appeared in books, newspapers, postcards, government reports, museums, and exhibitions, often reaching people who had little or no direct connection with Native communities.
Scholar Morgan F. Bell has written about the way these photographs helped shape the familiar image of the “Indian” as someone belonging to the past. Native people were often photographed in ways that emphasized clothing, ceremony, homes, or other details considered culturally distinctive, while the ordinary reality of contemporary Indigenous life was much less visible.
The photographs themselves were not necessarily false. Many preserve valuable records of people, communities, art, architecture, and daily life. The problem was often in how the images were framed and described. A person could become “Pueblo woman,” “Apache man,” “Navajo child,” or simply “unidentified,” with little attention given to the individual beyond the cultural category assigned to them.
Over time, that helped create a visual record filled with recognizable Native faces but surprisingly few names.
What the Record Kept
Jesse Nusbaum’s life is comparatively easy to follow. He worked in archaeology, photography, and preservation across the Southwest and later became superintendent of Mesa Verde National Park. His photographs, correspondence, professional work, and government service left behind a substantial record.
The woman and child at Jemez Pueblo were recorded very differently. Their community was noted, but their names were not preserved with the photograph. They were not anonymous in their own lives. They belonged to families and a community where people knew exactly who they were. What was lost was the connection between their names and the image that survived.
That changes the way we should read the word “unidentified.” It does not describe the person. It describes a gap in the archive.
Historical collections contain many photographs with this same imbalance. The photographer, collector, or researcher may be documented in considerable detail while the Indigenous people in the image are identified only by community, gender, age, or clothing. Those records tell us something about the priorities of the institutions and researchers who created them, as well as about the people they intended to document.
“Unidentified” does not mean a person had no identity. It means the record failed to preserve it.
More Than a Photograph From the Past
This history is part of why the words “We Are Still Here” carry so much meaning today. For generations, Native people were repeatedly shown through historic photographs that placed Indigenous life somewhere in the past. That visual habit helped create the false impression that Native cultures belonged to another era.
The woman and child in Nusbaum’s photograph did not remain frozen in that moment. Their lives continued after the photograph was taken, just as Jemez Pueblo continued. Indigenous communities kept raising families, maintaining traditions, speaking their languages, creating art, governing themselves, and adapting to changing circumstances.
Indigenous photographers, artists, filmmakers, and writers have also changed who gets to shape these images. Bell discusses this through the idea of visual sovereignty, in which Indigenous people have a direct role in determining how their communities, identities, and contemporary lives are represented.
That shift matters because Indigenous life does not have to look historical to be authentic. Tradition and contemporary life have always existed together.
Looking at Both Sides of the Lens
For the Museum of Indigenous People, this photograph connects closely to the mission “to instill understanding and respect for the Indigenous cultures of the Southwest.” Part of that work is looking carefully at the records museums inherit and recognizing where information is incomplete.
Jesse Nusbaum belongs in the story of this photograph. His work and his name are part of its history. But the woman and child should not become secondary figures simply because less information about them survived.
Their names may be missing from the archive, but their individuality is not missing from the photograph. They were people with families, histories, and lives that continued beyond the frame.
Museums cannot recover every name that was lost or never written down, but they can be clear about what is missing and why that matters. A caption should not be allowed to turn a person into a category simply because the historical record is incomplete.
We know the name of the man behind the camera. The people in front of it had names and stories too.
The photograph asks us to look at both sides of the lens, not only at who created the image, but at whose life was captured within it and what part of that life the historical record failed to keep.
Plan your Visit
The Museum of Indigenous People is located at 147 North Arizona Avenue in Prescott, Arizona. The museum is open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 AM to 4:00 PM and is closed Sunday.
Sources
Morgan F. Bell, “Some Thoughts on ‘Taking’ Pictures” — University of Nebraska–Lincoln Source
Jesse Nusbaum — National Park Service Source
Native American Portraits: Points of Inquiry — New Mexico History Museum / Palace of the Governors Photo Archives Source
History and Culture — Pueblo of Jemez Source
