I am Aleut and Inupiat, and my family has been adopted into a Tlingit family. As an Alaska Native, I feel that is important to take visual ownership of our lands. For the past 10 years I have been photographing with digital cameras. I was a professional photojournalist with the goal of publishing photographs in newspapers by the tightest of deadlines. I recently returned to Alaska from studies in New Mexico where I studied New Media arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts. I found myself empowered to tell my own story and have found my work shifting from that of a photographer seeking publication to an artist desiring to express myself.
These photographs are part of a landscape study of a 2-mile-long stretch at the mouth of the Chilkat River. At this point, the project is a year-long study of a place, and it will be a work in process. I seek to create a new visual identity for this place through an indigenous perspective. The final project will be a set of silver based black and white prints printed from digital negatives.
