Photography as Theory in Action: William Hanson Boorne, George Webber, and The People of The Blood
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract | This paper analyzes non-Indigenous representations of Kainai (Blood) ceremonial dances in Western Canada by comparing two distinct photographic events separated by a century. The first photographer, William Hanson Boorne, exhibits colonial assumptions about Indigenous people that were prevalent in the 1880s. He utilized mythologies about the camera as a “shadow catcher” when he surreptitiously photographed the sun dance against the wishes of the Kainai, capturing images of a practice he believed was about to disappear as the West was transformed by modernity. The second photographer, George Webber, is a contemporary documentarian operating out of Calgary, AB. In 2000, he also photographed participants in the Kainai sun dance. While he shared Boorne’s aim to depict spirituality and desire to present the West in transformation, Webber’s pictures and photographic practices are significantly different than his predecessor. He treats the camera as a cross-cultural memory tool and means of understanding personal change. Comparison of the two photographic events illuminates the Canadian West as a visual discourse and photography as “theory in action.”Résumé | Cet article analyse les représentations non-Indigènes des danses cérémonielles des Kainai (Gens-du-Sang) de l’Ouest du Canada en comparant deux événements photographiques distincts séparés par un siècle. Le premier photographe, William Hanson Boorne, était imprégné des présomptions coloniales sur les peuples Autochtones qui prévalaient au cours des années 1880. Boorne a employé les mythologies liées à l’appareil photo, comme sa prétendue capacité à « capturer l’ombre » (‘shadow catcher’) en photographiant la traditionnelle danse du soleil contre les souhaits des Kainais. Selon lui, il photographiait là les images d’une pratique qu’il croyait être sur le point de disparaître à cause de la modernisation de l’Ouest. Le deuxième photographe, George Webber, est un documentariste contemporain basé à Calgary (Alberta). En 2000, il a également photographié les participants à la danse du soleil des Kainais. Bien que Webber partage l’objectif de Boorne de représenter visuellement la spiritualité et le mouvement de modernisation de l’Ouest, sa pratique photographique est différente de celle de Boorne. Webber concevait l’utilisation de l’appareil photo comme un outil de mémoire culturelle et une façon de comprendre les changements tels que vécus par les individus. La comparaison des deux événements photographiques que représentent Boorne et Webber sont mis en contexte dans le cadre des deux thèmes de ce numéro spécial : l’Ouest canadien comme un discours visuel, et la photographie comme « théorie en l’action ».
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".