In order to view this feature, you must download the latest version of flash player here. 
#flashHeader{visibility:visible !important;}The black-and-white photograph taken in Killisnoo, Alaska, at the turn of the 20th century depicts a group of fishermen reeling in a gigantic halibut. The image is lighthearted and almost comical: workers smile as the imposing creature writhes perilously close to them.
What makes the photograph (Slide 5) unusual is not its subject matter but its subjects. The fishermen, working in apparent harmony, represent a cross section of the population of Killisnoo, an island off southeastern Alaska that was an important outpost for American businesses and tourism. Several of the men are white; at least two are Native American, members of the Tlingit community; and one is Asian. Taken at a time when racial integration was the exception and not the rule in the United States, the image by Vincent Soboleff, a Russian-American amateur photographer, is noteworthy.
As the Dartmouth anthropologist Sergei A. Kan argues in his new book, “A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country: Vincent Soboleff in Alaska†(University of Oklahoma Press), Mr. Soboleff’s images of the United States territory, especially its Native population, are also significantly different from others of the period.
Mr. Soboleff, who was born in Killisnoo in 1882, the son of the town’s well-regarded Russian Orthodox priest (Slide 9), set out to document his community almost as soon as he commandeered his family’s small Kodak camera as a teenager. His project ended in the late 1910s, when the need to help support his family after the death of his father drove him to seek more gainful employment, first as a postal worker and later as the owner of a popular general store and movie theater. While Mr. Soboleff later made some of his photographs into hand-tinted postcards and permitted a handful of local business to use his images as logos, he remained disengaged from the medium until his death in 1950.
Mr. Soboleff approached his subjects familiarly, with youthful enthusiasm. Nevertheless, he was reasonably knowledgeable about Native social organization, ceremonial life and history, a facility aided by his close relationship with the Tlingit community and his ability to speak its language fluently.
His pictures are competent but not artful or studied, unlike the work of more commercial photographers of Alaska’s Native population, like William Case and Horace Draper. This informality was part of his unconventional point of view. He rarely staged photographs or posed his subjects, favoring natural settings and straightforward depictions of everyday life and customs.
As 19th-century Native Americans were forced to adapt to a world dynamically altered by war, racial brutality, disease and displacement, photographic depictions of them habitually trafficked in stereotypes built on an implicit comparison between the new, “civilized†Indian and the tradition-bound “savage.†Mr. Soboleff’s pictures were more respectful of, and ultimately more informative about, his subjects, despite the fact that the Russian Orthodox Church, which began working in Alaska in the mid-18th century, was actively proselytizing in the Tlingit community.
The contents of Mr. Soboleff’s archive, some 780 plate negatives donated to the Alaska State Library by his sister in 1968, suggest that he was interested in capturing a wide-ranging view of life in Alaska. His photographs depict local buildings and landscapes, maritime culture, and the Tlingit, Russian-American, European-American and Asian-American residents of Killisnoo and a nearby town, Angoon. Mr. Kan’s rigorous study focuses on the pictures of people, particularly scenes of work, celebration and play, as well as of the interface between Native and non-Native populations.
This interaction was not as sanguine as it first appears in the photos. On the surface, Killisnoo seems like a racial paradise. Tlingit and Russian-American men labor together in factories, and the Russian-Americans, then referred to as Creoles and seen as not quite white by the nation at large, seem to be more empathetic to the plight of their Native co-workers. A leader of the Russian Orthodox Church poses with a Tlingit aristocrat in traditional Native ceremonial vestments. White and Native villagers participate in a Fourth of July celebration.
But closer inspection of that last image reveals disharmony. Although the white men are active participants, their Native counterparts are relegated to the sidelines as passive spectators. While workers of all races did labor together, Mr. Kan says, their leisure time was often spent apart: a number of photographs depict whites hunting, fishing, boating, hiking and playing in a small orchestra, largely without their Tlingit co-workers. Even in employment, integration went only so far. Jobs requiring specialized technical knowledge were restricted to whites.
Mr. Soboleff’s intimate portraits, especially of Tlingit aristocrats, are his most visually compelling images. The aesthetics of these photographs reside less in their formal or stylistic mastery and more in the artfulness of their subjects and environment. Such images afforded a culturally marginalized people an uncommon opportunity to represent themselves as they wanted to be seen, surrounded by stunning artifacts, especially the ceremonial objects and garments bearing the crests of individual clans.
Instead of transforming his subjects into exotic and anonymous icons, the 19th-century standard for images of American Indians, Mr. Soboleff treated them as individuals, identifying many by name in his captions. His subjects were also solicitous: “Local clan leaders, like most Tlingit people in general, were quite fond of being photographed,†Mr. Kan writes, valuing the images as “permanent proof of their high rank and status†or of the richness of their lives.
“Try putting yourself inside these photos,†writes Edwin Schupman, a citizen of the Muscogee Nation of Oklahoma and an educator at the National Museum of the American Indian, and “you might begin to understand the world from their points of view.†Mr. Schupman speaks to the importance of empathy in interpreting photos of Native peoples. For Mr. Soboleff, an honorary citizen of Tlingit country, an intimate understanding of his subjects was an important prerequisite for photographing them as well.
Maurice Berger is a research professor and the chief curator at the Center for Art, Design and Visual Culture at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County, and a consulting curator at the Jewish Museum in New York. He is the author of 11 books, including a memoir, “White Lies: Race and the Myths of Whiteness.†He curated a show, “For All the World to See: Visual Culture and the Struggle for Civil Rights,†and contributed essays to “Gordon Parks: Collected Works†(Steidl, 2013).
Follow @MauriceBerger and @nytimesphoto on Twitter. Lens is also on Facebook.
