CCHS Local History Series - Before And After and After: New Perspectives on the Carlisle Indian School

Guest Curator Kate Theimer will provide some background on the upcoming CCHS exhibit that will look at the images of Indian School Students. Some of the most well-known images of students from the Carlisle Indian Industrial School were the “contrast photos” which showed students “before and after”—as they first arrived at the school and after the process of assimilation had begun. Students had no control over how they were portrayed in these early images. But that would change as they began to exert more power both in front of and behind the camera. When students began paying local studios for their own portrait photographs, they controlled some aspects of their self-presentation, and over time as they became their own photographers, they created images that reflected their own individual personalities. While the school continued to commission formal photography for promotional purposes, the students were creating their own personal records of their lives during and after their time at Carlisle.