Pow Wow #11
Bozeman, Montana
2015

If she’s not a major matriarch, she sure ought to be. I’d listen to her I believe.

Pow Wow #10
Bozeman, Montana
2015

Pow Wow #9
Bozeman, Montana
2015

More nice headdresses. The guy in the middle and the young woman barely visible next to him were something similar to the king and queen of the pow wow (although I’m sure that’s not what they’re really referred to as). The lead the Grand Entry procession and after a turn around the arena were being presented to the officials in this shot.

Pow Wow #8
Bozeman, Montana
2015

One of my favorite male regalia headdress styles. Called roaches for some reason, they’re made of deer fur and porcupine guard hair (but not the sharp quills). Again, probably because I’ve watched too many old westerns, these have a very aggressive look to them.

Pow Wow #7
Bozeman, Montana
2015

Just another face in the crowd.

A number of the shots I took at the pow wow showed a blur of movement across most of the image due to a shutter speed that was long enough to not be able to freeze the action due to  the rapid movement of the dancers. Yet in a surprisingly large percentage of those, one dancer’s face comes through quite sharp amidst all the movement.

Pow Wow #6
Bozeman, Montana
2015

A key component to a pow wow is of course the drummers and singers. Like this guy, they do not generally wear regalia, rather they dress in regular street clothes. We were standing about twenty feet from this particular circle of drummers and the sound they were putting out was impressively loud; I think my chest was actually noticeably compressing with the low bass vibrations put out by the drum. It’s hard to figure how this woman and her child could sit so passively right next to them. (The young girl may have her fingers in her ear. If so I guess that’s a reaction.)

Pow Wow #5
Bozeman, Montana
2015

Pow Wow #4
Bozeman, Montana
2015

 I took this photo primarily because of the cute young jingle dancer, but it also shows some women wearing elk tooth dresses (in the right rear of the photo), another of my favorites. Elk teeth are very highly prized and hard to come by as each elk only has two ivory teeth. Because of the supply-demand mismatch, even in the old days there were imitation elk teeth carved from bone. Today bone teeth are still produced and of course there are plastic ones as well. Real or imitation I think the dresses look very elegant. (Look at me talking like the Fashion Queen here!)

Pow Wow #3
Bozeman, Montana
2014

This particular group of dancers are wearing one of my favorite styles of outfits. (I’m sure they have a name but I don’t know what it is.) They are just entering the arena, only started to pick up their feet to dance. The numbers on the dancers are to identify them for competition purposes I presume, although I don’t believe there was a competition aspect to the Grand Entry.

Like this image, the rest of this series are going to be monochrome. While the colors of the regalia is certainly not to be ignored at these events I still think the patterns and shapes, which are of even greater interest to me, are better emphasized by presenting them without the distraction of color.

I don’t usually tint my monochrome images this much but I wanted to give this series a bit more of a vintage feel commensurate with the historic aspects of the dances and the regalia. Because it is a historic effect I was after I chose to use the same toning colors as the famous Edward Curtis Indian photographs. Tints of his photos vary quite a bit, at least in their internet presentations. I chose to copy the color from this particular image of an Indian named One Blue Beard:

Da Vinci’s Wings
Photo by Robert ParkeHarrison

Some really interesting photos by Mr. ParkeHarrison (yes, that’s the correct punctuation) can be seen here. I find them a bit disturbing, but in a really engaging way.