The portrait is one of the most popular types of visual imagery. The APS collections contain thousands of portraits of Native Americans from all over the Western hemisphere, dating from the 1600s to the present day. Some of the earliest depict eminent people such as Pocahontas, famed princess of the Powhatan tribe of Virginia, and Moctezuma II, ruler of Mexico’s Aztec empire.

Such early portraits were usually imaginary, but later images were made by artists who actually encountered the people they drew or painted.  In the 1820s and 1830s, Thomas Loraine McKenney, Commissioner of Indian Affairs for the U.S. government, hired artists to paint portraits of Native chiefs and other delegates who were visiting Washington, D.C. for treaty negotiations. The images were then published in book form with biographical texts, forming an important historic record of Native leadership in this period.

The advent of photography in 1839 opened new opportunities for portraitists. Capturing someone’s appearance was now easier than ever before, though early photographic equipment was bulky and exposures relatively slow. Thus, the first photographs of Native Americans and others tend to be formal, posed studio portraits. In the 1860s, for instance, A. Zeno Shindler followed McKenney’s example, creating dignified portrayals of Native treaty delegates in his Washington, D.C. studio.

By the late 1800s and early 1900s, hand-held cameras and easier photographic processing made a wider range of images possible, though indoor photography was still a challenge. This may explain why the APS anthropological collections contain so many informal portraits of Native individuals and families outside their homes, such as the photograph of a Cocopa man and his grandaughter taken in Baja California in 1915. Today, Native Americans also pose for or take their own portraits of family members and friends, in order to commemorate the important individuals in their lives.