Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon ? Laura Gilpin, Queerness, and Navajo Sovereignty

What are the limits of political solidarity, and how can visual culture contribute to social change?

A fundamental dilemma exists in documentary photography: can white artists successfully portray Indigenous lives and communities in a manner that neither appropriates nor romanticizes them? With an attentive and sensitive eye, Louise Siddons examines lesbian photographer Laura Gilpin’s classic 1968 book The Enduring Navaho to illuminate the intersectional politics of photography, Navajo sovereignty, and queerness over the course of the twentieth century.

Gilpin was a New York–trained fine arts photographer who started working with Navajo people when her partner accepted a job as a nurse in Arizona. She spent more than three decades documenting Navajo life and creating her book in collaboration with Navajo friends and colleagues. Framing her lesbian identity and her long relationship with the Navajo people around questions of allyship, Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon addresses the long and problematic history of White photographers capturing images of Native life. Simultaneously, Siddons uses Gilpin’s work to explore the limitations of White advocacy in a political moment that emphasized the need for Indigenous visibility and voices.

Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon introduces contemporary Diné (Navajo) artists as interlocutors, critics, and activists whose work embodies and extends the cultural sovereignty politics of earlier generations and makes visible the queerness often left implicit in Gilpin’s photographs. Siddons puts their work in conversation with Gilpin’s, taking up her mandate to viewers and readers of The Enduring Navajo to address Navajo aesthetics, traditions, politics, and people on their own terms.

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"Louise Siddons writes with warmth, originality, and scholarly depth, employing the fascinating personal archives of Laura Gilpin to consider anew the intersection between lesbian and Navajo politics across the mid-twentieth century. By incorporating the voices and works of contemporary, queer Navajo artists, she encourages us to think about the implications of visual sovereignty in our own moment in powerful and engaging ways."—Cara Rodway, British Library

"Louise Siddons has written a vital book that explores the complex relationship of queer, Indigenous, and settler histories and representations through a focus on Laura Gilipin’s photographic studies of the Navajo. By refusing to shy away from hard questions, Good Pictures Are a Strong Weapon grapples sharply with the meanings and practices of intersectionality, the artistic gaze, Indigenous–settler collaborations, and Indigenous sovereignty. This book produces a compelling personal and political portrait and analysis that demands our attention and allows us to see things in new ways."—Kevin Bruyneel, author of Settler Memory: The Disavowal of Indigeneity and the Politics of Race in the United States