The Grass Shall Grow: Helen Post Photographs the Native American West by Mick Gidley (review)

Abstract

In this richly illustrated book, photography scholar Mick Gidley makes a convincing case for greater attention to the work of Helen Post. While her sister, Marion Post Wolcott of Farm Security Administration (FSA) photography fame, was and remains better known, Gidley argues that Helen Post’s images of Native Americans in the Great Plains and West expand our understanding of New Deal documentary photography in important ways. Gidley opens by introducing us to Post and her photographic training in Vienna in the early thirties before turning specifically to her work on Indian reservations. He reads Post’s photography of Native people in three ways: through an analysis of her collaboration with author Oliver La Farge on the 1940 nonfiction book As Long as the Grass Shall Grow, which purported to visualize “Indians today”; through a discussion of her portraits of Native people, including images produced to illustrate Ann Clark’s 1944 novel, Brave Against the Enemy; and through situating Post’s work in the context of the work of the Bureau of Indian Affairs. Across these analyses Gidley balances readings of Post’s photographs with attention to how they were produced, reproduced, and circulated. As a result, the reader gets a sense not only of Post’s photographic skill (e.g., how she successfully employed flash photography) but also the larger cultural and governmental contexts in which she was working. Throughout the book Gidley argues that Post’s photographs avoided stereotypes, even when they were embedded in contexts that might have perpetuated them. In particular, he highlights Post’s lack of mythologizing and her emphasis on contemporary people living ordinary lives. As the author of two books on Edward Curtis, Gidley is aware of the power dynamics involved when nonNative photographers picture Native people. Gidley acknowledges that he does not have archival access to how Post’s subjects felt about being photographed, so he largely relies on her and her son’s accounts of the relationships she built with Native people. Yet at least one image in the book suggests there is more to be explored here. The book’s opening image, bled onto a full page, features a Lakota woman, Annie Bordeaux, fitting Post for a pair of moccasins. The photograph captures what appears to be a friendly, perhaps even intimate, moment. More than a simple picture of photographer with subject, though, the photograph invites questions about cultural appropriation as well as further exploration of the tensions inherent in the transactional nature of documentary encounters. Gidley’s book brings to light important work by a talented photographer who has been largely lost to history until now. It is a valuable addition to scholarship on photography of Native Americans, the Great Plains, and the New Deal era.