What is photographer Shane Balkowitsch doing shooting portraits in a burned-out shell of a building in Fort Yates, North Dakota?
You could call it a professional courtesy — visiting the studio of a fellow photographer to pick up one final portrait of the kind the Fort Yates studio was known for. It’s just that the studio that photographer Frank Fiske was working in around 1900 burned down in about 2010 and those trees growing up by the ruins are messing a bit with the composition. Nevertheless, Balkowitsch is making portraits of Floris Crystal White Bull — “the last sitter at Fiske’s studio,” Balkowitsch says — on May 14, 2024.
He has photographed her before. Activist and writer White Bull — a descendant of Chief White Bull who grew up on Standing Rock Reservation and cowrote and narrated the 2017 documentary about protests against the Dakota Access Pipeline, Awake: A Dream From Standing Rock — sat for him in 2016.
The previous image he shot of Floris was documented earlier in the series. The original plate of this new image will go to the State Historical Society of North Dakota to further document Fiske’s studio by having a Native American who lives just a few miles away photographed at what had been his front door. Though Balkowitsch takes non-Native portraits and creates other art pieces as well, his photographs of Native Americans, like Fiske’s, are his life’s work.
Balkowitsch uses wet plate photography to document how Native culture has survived and thrived into the 21st century. But he is continually aware that he’s building on the work of frontier photographers such as Fiske, many of whose photographs are in the archives of the State Historical Society of North Dakota.
Fiske — who was born in 1883 at Fort Bennett in Dakota Territory and grew up at Fort Yates on the Standing Rock Indian Reservation, where he attended the local boarding school with Indigenous children — primarily photographed the Lakota in North and South Dakota. He would doubtless appreciate Balkowitsch’s gesture and be amazed to see him photographing Floris Crystal White Bull, whose forebear Chief White Bull was once photographed by Fiske himself. He might wonder, though, at the photographer’s chosen process. For although wet plate photography greatly expanded the use and versatility of photography after it was popularized starting in 1851, it was being abandoned in favor of less-cumbersome dry plate photography by about 1885.
Fiske was a dry plate photographer. Balkowitsch suspects the frontier photographer probably would have thought the wet plate photographer visiting his Fort Yates studio in 2024 was curiously devoted to an old-fashioned Civil War-era technology — and in the age of digital, at that.
Learn about the life and photography of Shane Balkowitsch.
From our August/September 2024 issue.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy of Shane Balkowitsch
