Published: October 27, 2009 01:45 am      

ARTS: Native expressions

Raised on the Tuscarora Reservation, Canisius English professor puts words to acclaimed photographer’s imagery

It’s not like he had never done such a thing before. In fact, as a professor of English, he often had asked his writing students to do just that. Look at a picture and find the words to tell me what you see.

But this was different.

As an accomplished novelist, poet and painter, this request was hitting him where he lived, or at least where he once lived.

Eric Gansworth is a Native American of the Onondaga Indian clan, but his family has lived on the Tuscarora Nation in Lewiston since its inception.

A prolific writer on all matters of Native American topics, it appears to those who approach his work that there is a part of his spirit that still resides in his childhood home.

So actually, he was the perfect choice for what he was being asked to do.

It started several years ago. When Gansworth was approached by Buffalo photographer Milton Rogovin, an internationally known photographer whose stark black and white photos of the working class are exhibited in distinguished institutions around the world including the Library of Congress and the J. Paul Getty Museum.

Rogovin and his adult son, Mark, the administrator of his father’s huge body of work, asked Gansworth to put words to images of Native Americans that Rogovin had photographed on the Tuscarora Reservation and on Buffalo’s Lower West Side.

Gansworth was unsure. “There’s a really long and dubious history of American Indians and non-Indian photographers, going back to Edward Curtis, who actually paid his subjects to wear clothing they wouldn’t normally wear and to shave their facial hair,” Gansworth said. “There were all these explicit attempts to portray them as a group of people whose identify was dying.”

Then Gansworth looked carefully at Rogovin’s work.

And he saw what many see, a meticulous, exquisite documentation of people who are in control of the outcome, posing in manners of their own choice for the photographers unblinking eye.

Rogovin traveled the world —from China to Mexico to Africa to Appalachia — asking people to if he could take their picture. The resulting photographs open the lives of the working poor throughout the world and present them in all the ways that are strikingly similar. For instance, he photographed a series of coal miners in Appalachia and Zimbabwe, and showed them sharing the same hobby — raising carrier pigeons.

“These people had chosen the way they really wanted to be represented and that was the key for me,” Gansworth said. “The subjects themselves were really happy with the way they were being portrayed.”

Rogovin, who will be 100 in December, has collaborated with poets before. One of his most recent books was published with the poems of Pablo Neruda, considered by some as one of the most influential poets of the 20th century.

Gansworth decided to take on the project, placing the 150 or so photos on a table to try to determine what the faces wanted him to say. Although some were living in the city and some were living in the country he found that an idea began to form in his head that the book was going to be about attempts to live within these two very separate yet similar communities.

The grandmothers were what really pulled his work together, the proud, wrinkled, dignified faces of the women who, in his culture were held in esteem.

“The idea of reverence for elders and specifically for the elder women really comes to the forefront,” he explained noting that one’s identity within a lot of Six Nations communities is determined by the identity of your mother and consequently your grandmother.

“I really like that they were not very glamorous, they were just beautiful images,” he said.

Now that it has been published, “From the Western Door to the Lower West Side,” will take on a life of its own.

Rogovin’s son, Mark, hopes to get the exhibit installed in the Smithsonian, using the book as a sort of catalog for the show. The son sees his father’s body of work as a cultural teaching tool.

“My father was an optometrist,” Mark Rogovin said. “He did not earn a living as a photographer. He did this for educational purposes.”

The work, Mark Rogovin said, is a way to open a discussion about the lives of the working poor. “These were not Hollywood folks,” he said. “They have dignity, they have wealth, but it’s not monetary.”

Ted Pietrzak, director of the Burchfield, called the exhibit “truly a community celebration.”

“It’s also terrific working with a Native American community. It’s a community that doesn’t get a lot of visibility in cultural institutions.”

The art center held a special reception for Native American leaders when the exhibit opened. The exhibit, which belongs to the Burchfield, will travel to the Seneca-Iroquois Museum next year, and there will be attempts to loan it to the Smithsonian, he said.

Those who want to know more about Rogovin’s work can visit www.miltonrogovan.com, where his work is grouped in the different series that span his career, and which includes a special education section for teachers.

As for Gansworth, he will share the words he has written during a reading at 2 p.m. today at the Burchfield Art Center in Buffalo, among a selection from Rogovin’s native American series.

Gansworth enjoys reading his work aloud. “What I’ve found, strangely enough, is that some people who have difficulty reading poetry find it more accessible if they’ve heard me read it,” he said. Those who might like to explore Gansworth’s own body of work can visit nativewiki.org/Eric_Gansworth. Today, after the reading, Gansworth will go back to his creative efforts and teaching. He is looking forward to a “career-spanning” visual art show of his work planned at Westfield State College in the spring.

He also has a new novel coming out next fall called “Extra Indians,” about a “reservation guy who goes to Hollywood in the late ’60s hoping to become a movie star and who doesn’t, and who commits suicide.”

When told he had just given away the book’s ending he paused and said, “No, that’s the beginning ...”