Annu Palakunnathu Matthew

Here Annu Palakunnathu Matthew presents a self-portrait that plays on her perceived “otherness” as an Indian immigrant living in the United States. Matthew paired a romanticized historical photograph of a Native American by Edward S. Curtis with an image of herself, modifying the garb and stereotypes of the original “other” to reflect her own culture and present questions about the colonial gaze.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, Curtis and other photographers depicted Native people as “the vanishing race.” Curtis sought to record the dignity of his subjects, but his images staged narratives that rendered the people in them figuratively in the past, obscuring their continued presence.

“As an immigrant, I am often questioned about where I am ‘really from.’ When I say that I am Indian, I often have to clarify that I am an Indian from India. In this portfolio, I look at the other ‘Indian’. I find similarities how Nineteenth century photographers of Native Americans looked at what they called the primitive natives, similar to the colonial gaze of the Nineteenth century British photographers working in India. In every culture there is the ‘other.’”