Navajo photographer Priscilla Tacheney’s images are strong and finely orchestrated. And they are full of meaning.
In one of Navajo photographer Priscilla Tacheney’s award-winning images, a coyote with a deer skin at his feet is superimposed onto a background of a mountain range and a starry sky. In another, a woman stands on the edge of a cliff with the tail of a swirl of corn pollen at her fingertips. Graphic and sharp, the images are strong and finely orchestrated. And they are full of meaning.
“As a Navajo, it’s important for me to share my traditional stories, and keep that going for the people in my culture and for the younger people in my tribe,” says Tacheney, who lives in Prescott Valley, Arizona. “We have traditional storytellers that are telling stories and making illustrations in books and trying to keep our stories alive for the generation behind us, and I’m using photography to do that as well.”
After working as a graphic designer for the Prescott Daily Courier, and then for 14 years as a fine art photographer — primarily focusing on landscapes, then portraiture, and sometimes blending the two — Tacheney made the decision to take her photography in a different direction, toward something more conceptual. “I started doing more storytelling, putting composite photos together to tell a story inspired by Navajo traditional stories and create something beautiful, like an art piece,” says Tacheney, who shoots with a Nikon D750. “My style is more like a painter. R.C. Gorman, a well-known Navajo painter who painted women in a simplistic way, is one of my influences. I want to show the beauty of my people.”
Each element of her photographs is intentional, a symbolic representation of something more. The one with the coyote, the hide, the mountains, and the stars is a photographic illustration of a Navajo creation story; the Milky Way is the result of the coyote’s impatience with the Earth’s creators, the holy people, who were carefully placing the stars in the sky, one by one. “But the coyote, he’s off in the distance and he’s watching and on the fourth day, he became impatient and he decided that it was taking too long, so he picked up the hide in his mouth and threw up the stones, and that’s how we got the Milky Way,” she says.
One photo is layered on top of another and manipulated so it appears as one. It often takes up to 40 hours from start to finish, as Tacheney blends the colors together much like a painter would do. In the corn-pollen piece, the photograph of a woman wearing a red and white blanket standing on a cliff’s edge was taken on the Navajo reservation where she grew up and where she takes many of her landscape photos. “I had some photos of clouds, and I added in the corn pollen, and with Photoshop, I made the cloud go in a swirl,” she says. “I’ve evolved into a photographer who does graphic art. I spend hours trying to work with these images to look like I shot it that way. My graphic design background and knowing Photoshop and years of training really help me blend my images to where they look seamless and authentic.”
Still, not everyone gets it, at least not at first, she says. “Once someone says, ‘Can you tell me what this is?’ and when I explain to them what it means, it’s instantly ‘Oh my gosh, I have to have that piece.’ Once they understand what it means, it gets sold.”
Through the Lens of Navajo Photographer Priscilla Tacheney will be on view through March 31 at Amerind Museum in Dragoon, Arizona (amerind.org). See her work on her website: squashblossomfotos.com.
From our February/March 2022 issue
Photography: (All images) courtesy Priscilla Tacheney