JL: How did you get the opportunity to take
the photographs of the Lakota dancers out at Pine Ridge?
DMK: Oh God.
JL: Is this an awful
question?
DMK: Yes it's an awful
question.
JL: Sorry.
DMK: That's ok, part of it,
I'm still coming to terms with . But it's good to talk about
it. That's part of coming to terms with it. I've always been
really interested in native spirituality and I've always
felt a kind of kinship to it and I guess the thing that
really got me going is when I worked with a guy named
Leonard Peltier.
I actually worked a
tremendous amount for Bob Guccione at Penthouse magazine.
It's funny because a lot of people say they don't buy
Penthouse magazine for the pictures, they buy it for the
articles. Guccione had tremendous articles in that magazine.
His was the first national magazine that did a story on
Leonard Peltier, and that's what I did for him. I
never photographed the girls. I always photographed the
people that they did the stories with. I photographed Elliot
Gould for him. I photographed Jimmy Swaggert's hooker for
him. I photographed Reverend Fletcher of the PTO for him. I
did great stuff for Guccione; wonderful people, very
interesting - and important stories (most of them) and
important stories that weren't being covered by a lot of
other media.
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Picuris Deer
Dancer #1, 15 1/4 x 15 1/4, Palladium Print, January 1994
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Taos Hoop
Dancer #1, 15 1/4 x 15 1/4, Palladium Print, December 1993 |
DMK: So anyway, Guccione
sent me to Leavenworth prison to photograph Peltier.
So, I photographed Leonard in Leavenworth and really felt
like a kinship with this guy.
JL: So you got to talk to him
and hang out with him?
DMK: We spent three or four
hours together in the penitentiary and I set up a little
studio there and we just hung out and made some pictures and
talked.
Amazing man, I really liked
Leonard, I really enjoyed him. When I looked in his eyes,
man, I looked in his eyes and I don't believe he is a
murderer. I don't believe he did any of that shit.
JL: I don't either.
DMK: I mean you read the
books and you read the trial transcripts and there is no way
you come away and think he did it. So anyway, I left New
York and when I got to New Mexico, I really wanted to work
with Native Americans and I kind of looked around for a
while, and I hooked up with a tseuki buffalo dancer and I
talked about the idea of doing a project on ceremonial dance
with him.
The first one I did was the 8
Northern Pueblos in New Mexico. That took almost 7
years to do 8 pictures.
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DMK: Yeah, because I really needed to do it
in a good way and I wanted to do it with permission.
JL: Yes I understand.
DMK: It was a huge pain in
the ass because I was dealing with the tribal government and
everybody was suspect of what I was doing. And you know the
Indians have been ripped off so bad that nobody really
trusted me. I still give a percentage of the sales of those
prints back to the tribes.
JL: That's cool.
DMK: And, for seven
years I fought to get those 8 pictures done and finally we
got them done and I felt a little burned out; but my
affinity has always been towards the plains Indian. So, when
I finished the Northern Pueblo portfolio, I decided I wanted
to work with the plains Indians. I went out to South Dakota
and I met a bunch of folks on the Pine Ridge Reservation,
particularly a woman named Chic Big Crow.
Chic had lost her daughter in
a car accident and I had lost my daughter in a car accident
and so we had kind of an affinity. There was this nice
connection and Chic had started the Sioux Big Crow Boys and
Girls Club on the reservation. I had learned my lesson
from working with the 8 Northern Pueblo Council that I
realized that going through the tribal government was the
wrong way to go.
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San Juan Eagle
Dancer #2, 15 1/4 x 15 1/4, Palladium Print, August 1993
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Nambe Spear
Dancer #2, 15 1/4 x 15 1/4, Palladium Print, July 1993 |
JL: Seven years?
DMK: Because the tribal
governments are ripping off the people. It's a huge pain in
the ass. So when I went up to Pine Ridge, I was
looking for more grass roots people, medicine people,
spiritual leaders, people that were involved in the
community, people that were more traditional, and were not
involved in tribal government per se. So Chic was perfect -
she was very involved in the community. She was trying to
put together this boys and girls club on a shoestring and I
talked to her and told her what I would like to do - that I
would like to do this work with the dancers up in South
Dakota. And, that I would give a percentage of all the sales
to the Sioux Boys and Girls Club. So, the money wasn't
going back into the tribal coffers - it was going to a very
specific thing.
JL: That's great.
DMK: Yeah. In return for
that, what I wanted her to do was to introduce me to people;
let people know that I'm an ok kind of person, and just kind
of help smooth the way with introductions to the people who
spiritually ok what I was doing.
So she agreed and that took
about 7 years to do that too. The way they were done,
all of the dancers were ceremonial dancers and a lot of the
dances are most of the time dances that are not even seen,
much less photographed. But, when I photographed them,
none of them were in ceremony. It's like I would go to the
ceremonies. I would try and learn about them. I would
participate in some of them and eventually I would find a
dancer and get permission from the medicine people to do it.
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DMK: And then I would
take the dancer and go away somewhere, You know, just me and
the dancer, out in the hills, out in the plains somewhere
and we would photograph it and I felt better about that
because I really wasn't interfering with the ceremonies. And
so, I really wasn't photographing the ceremonies.
We did it as accurately and
traditionally as we could, but at the same time we were
outside of the ceremonial situation and that seemed to make
everybody feel more comfortable.
JL: Were there any other
problems?
DMK: Yes, there's a few
inherent problems with it, one of the problems is working
with Native Americans. There are always that fringe of
people who don't understand what you are doing, that feels -
once again - here's another guy ripping off Indian culture.
JL: Yes, like exploiting the
culture.
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Heyoka Lakota
Nation 19 5/8 X 19 1/2, Palladium Print, September 1998
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Ghost Dancer
Lakota Nation 20 1/8 X 19 5/8, Palladium Print, September
1998
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DMK: And that was a huge
battle, even today that's a huge battle. People see the work
and they accuse me of that.
JL: Really?
DMK: I find myself constantly
defending what I'm doing.
JL: Like your intentions?
DMK: Yeah, you know you get
kind of sick of saying "I'm not ripping anybody off".
This
was done in a good way, it was done with permission, money
goes back to the people.
JL: Yes, it also brings
awareness to their cause and what's going on out there.
DMK: Exactly. I thought that
this was a really good thing for all those reasons,
bringing awareness to the culture, sharing the culture, but
I found that there was an awful lot of friction about it and
then I started looking at the work and started thinking you
know, this work is showing the Native Americans in really
good light.
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