Yahoo Autos A Native American photographer took powerful portraits of members of every tribe across the US
Matika Wilbur photographed members of every federally recognized Native American tribe.
She named the series Project 562 after the over 562 federally recognized tribes in the US.
Her book "Project 562: Changing the Way We See Native America" comes out in April 2023.
Photographer Matika Wilbur went on a mission to photograph members of every federally recognized Native tribe in North America.
Wilbur herself is Swinomish and Tulalip. She began Project 562 after her grandmother appeared to her in a dream and told her to leave an assignment in South America and photograph her own people.
She drove hundreds of thousands of miles and photographed members of different Native American tribes for Project 562.
When Wilbur began her project in 2012, there were 562 federally recognized Native American tribes. Now, there are 574.
The project has grown from a photo series to a documentary project to a full-blown archive of Native people, their communities, and their stories.
"We're always redrafting the language to describe this project," Wilbur told Insider in 2016.
Wilbur photographed her subjects on black-and-white film using a method called the Zone System.
The Zone System creates more dynamic range in the images.
She's drawn to peer portraiture with simple landscape backdrops.
"I figured that that was sort of irresponsible when I started this project, to travel all over the country and not show the landscape," Wilbur said.
She let her subjects choose where and how they'd like to be photographed, providing them with agency over the way they'd be represented.
"Sometimes I'll be in the Grand Canyon and I'd rather take somebody's picture at Havasupai Falls because it's magnificent and there's this incredible blue-green water coming out of the ground ... and they want to be photographed on their front porch because they love where they live," she said. "I'll do what they want to do because people should be represented in a way that is important to them, especially in Indian Country."
"We've been photographed so many times by non-Indians and we've had our stories told so many times by people outside our community, and they get the story wrong," Wilbur said.
