In Light and Shadow

A landmark photography collection featuring work exclusively by Indigenous Americans, shedding new light on the understanding of Indigenous America.

The history of photography–and the Americas–is incomplete without the critical work and perspectives of Indigenous American photographers. Since the 1800s, cameras have been in the hands of Indigenous people and they have incorporated photography into their lives as creators, patrons, and collectors.

Five years ago, photographers Brian Adams and Sarah Stacke set off on a mission to assemble a groundbreaking, digital library of Indigenous photographers from the 19th century to the present. With In Light and Shadow: A Photographic History from Indigenous America, Adams and Stacke expand on that work, creating a one-of-a-kind collection of photographs that offers a first-hand look at the people, cultures, and evolving traditions of Indigenous America while providing a counterhistory to settler-colonial narratives.

From Jennie Fields Ross Cobb, the earliest known Indigenous American woman photographer, to Arhuaco documentarian Amado Villafaña Chaparro, through Kapuleiikealoonalani Flores, a Native Hawaiian who was born in 2000, the photographers span many generations as well as multiple Indigenous societies and nations. Each entry includes a biographical sketch of the artist, along with their inspirations and contributions to the photographic medium.

With profiles of 80 photographers and more than 250 photographs, this unique book brings to light the canon of Indigenous American photography that has been developing on its own terms for decades.

• “In Light and Shadow is an essential book that reshapes, transforms, and reframes the biased narrative of our existence in the Americas. Outsiders have been exploiting our images since the invention of photography and film, but finally we have a collection of our own photographers embodying the humor, spirit, pain, beauty, and love of our own people…A story that humanizes us one image at a time.”

  Sterlin Harjo, filmmaker and 2024 MacArthur Fellow

• “Offering biographical summaries and selections of work from eighty photographers and spanning more than a century of image-making, In Light and Shadow is a glimpse into generally unknown records of Indigenous American art and life. The book is an exciting and significant contribution to the history of photography and to the ongoing redefinition of the photographic canon.”

  Kathryn Humphries, art director, Harper’s Magazine

• “This remarkable collection demonstrates how Indigenous people from across the Americas use photography for their own purposes. In their hands, images become a means to define community identities on their own terms, preserve cultures and histories, and advance political claims, including those surrounding land. In Light and Shadow compels us to see Native America in a new way.”

  Shari Huhndorf, Class of 1938 Professor of Native American Studies, University of California, Berkeley

• “This book constitutes a relevant visual contribution to the collective postcolonial process that is taking place on the American continent. Indigenous peoples have resisted for centuries, using their own public appearance as an element that plays between light and shadow, to the point that we have believed them extinct or totally co-opted. However, they are there, whispering in our ears, que la luz será mañana para los más.”

  Natalia Arcos Salvo, researcher and curator