The Wild Girl
To Guy
“I love three things. I love a dream of love I once had, I love you, and I love this patch of earth.”
“And which do you love best?”
“The dream.”
KNUT HAMSUN,
Pan
If the ways of seeing in different communities are in conflict because their interpretative practices reflect incommensurable presuppositions about the human situation, can such communities understand each other? Can one culture use its own terms to say something about another culture without engaging in a hostile act of appropriation or without simply reflecting itself and not engaging the otherness of the Other? . . . Can we ever escape our provincial islands and navigate between worlds?
PAUL B. ARMSTRONG, “PLAY AND CULTURAL DIFFERENCES,”
Kenyon Review
13 (WINTER 1991)
Until I was about ten years old, I did not know that people died except by violence.
JAMES KAYWAYKLA, WARM SPRINGS APACHE
In the Days of Victorio,
EVE BALL
PROLOGUE
IN THE AUTUMN OF 1999,
a small retrospective of the Depression-era photographs of a little-known photographer from New Mexico named Ned Giles was held at the Beaux Arts Gallery in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. At the time, the Beaux Arts was considered to be an important gallery, and the show created a brief flurry of interest in Giles’s work, a few favorable reviews in the mainstream press, and some high-dollar sales to influential collectors.
Ned Giles had never achieved the same degree of success in his lifetime as such other Depression-era photographers as Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans, whose haunting images of hard times came to be considered an essential part of the American narrative. Although Giles’s photographs were technically and artistically comparable, they had been largely ignored by the art world, an oversight at least partly attributable to the fact that much of his early work was shot on Native American reservations in the Southwestern United States. This was neither a region nor a subject matter of much interest to the American public in those days, even less so to the New York art community, both of which preferred to ignore the “third world” reality of the modern Native American situation in favor of a more sentimental, idealized version of its past. As one critic of his show couldn’t help but point out, Ned Giles’s photographs “lack the splendor, romanticism and sometimes mysticism of Edward S. Curtis’s photos of native Americans.” Yet Ned Giles began his career a full decade after Curtis completed his monumental North American Indian series, and it had never been his intention to document a vanishing way of life, as it had already thoroughly vanished by the time he came along.
By 1999, Ned Giles was in his early eighties, twice-divorced, retired, in poor health and living on Social Security in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Although he had always loathed New York City on general principle, he had agreed to attend his first one-man show there because the gallery had sent him a free plane ticket and was paying for his hotel room. Also, while he had little experience with the “art world,” he suspected from his long career as a professional photojournalist that it would be easier to collect his share of the proceeds, hopefully in cash, if he was actually on the scene.
Except for the money he so badly needed, Ned Giles was close enough to the end of his own life by then that he found his brief moment in the artistic sun to be utterly meaningless, and even mildly irritating. After the end of the Great Depression, he had made a modest living for some years as a newspaper and magazine photographer, and occasional wire-press stringer, working in several different cities around the country. He had been on the European front during the Second World War as an Associated Press photographer, accompanying the American troops through France. He had been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for a photograph he took of a French family in a village in Normandy having a large, gay lunch in the dining room of their home, tables laden with cheeses, meats, and wine, all lovely except that their house had no walls or ceiling, which lay in bombed rubble about them. Giles lost the Pulitzer that year to Robert Capa.
After the war, Giles moved back to the Southwest, where he kept steadily employed in the newspaper business for several decades. But because he steadfastly refused to live in either New York or Los Angeles, or any of the other urban power centers, he more or less faded into obscurity. Now he had no interest in fame, and mostly he just wished that he’d had the dough thirty, forty, or fifty years ago, when it might have done him some real good.
Besides a sampling of his early reservation work, among the photographs hanging in the New York show was a series of images of the bronco Apache Indians taken in the early 1930s in the Sierra Madre Mountains of Mexico. These had never before been seen by the public, indeed, were not even previously known to have existed, and more than any of the others, they were responsible for the sudden flurry of interest in Giles’s work. One of them was a photograph of a young Apache girl taken in the town jail in the tiny village of Bavispe, Sonora. Titled
La Niña Bronca, 1932,
it was a startling image, full of horror and devastating irony: The girl lay curled in a fetal position, imprisoned forever in the dark womb of a Mexican jail cell, the shadows of iron bars falling like a convict’s striped uniform across her naked body.
Ned Giles stood regarding this photograph at his first one-man show at the Beaux Arts Gallery in New York City. The date was October 24, 1999, and Giles sipped a glass of bad white wine from a plastic cup. He looked at the photograph and remembered this single galvanizing moment in his life as if it had happened yesterday. He remembered setting up his tripod and camera that morning, over a half century before, flooding this poor creature with artificial lights run off an ancient gas generator, this slight, starving girl curled on the floor of the cell. He remembered how the place smelled, the sickening stench of human filth mingled with the gas fumes from the generator flooding his nostrils even now, as it did every time he looked at this image. He remembered the din of the generator in the close space, blocking it out of his mind as he worked—even then he was cool, dispassionate, professional, though he had only been seventeen years old. He remembered focusing his Deardorff 8×10 view camera, remembered the lens he had used, a f/4.5 Zeiss Tessar. He remembered making two negatives, then moving the tripod for a different angle, refocusing, changing the lights, and making three more. Remembered finally stepping away from the camera when his work was finished, and being filled with such a sense of raw shame and revulsion that his life would never again be the same.
“I’m guessing that you’re the photographer,” a man at his elbow said now in a confidential tone.
Giles took another swallow of wine, anxious to be done with this gallery affair, away from all these people and back at his hotel bar, alone, for a real drink. For health reasons he had quit drinking some years ago, but more recently had decided what the hell difference did it make; he was old and didn’t have long to live anyway. “What makes you guess that?” he asked the man.
The man smiled with a kind of false familiarity. “Because that’s the most unfashionable suit I’ve seen in thirty years,” he whispered. “Only the artist could get away with an outfit like that.”
Giles looked down at his rumpled, stained suit, threadbare and shiny with age. He nodded. He knew that he looked like an old bum. And he certainly didn’t think of himself as an artist. Even in his youth, especially in his socialist days, he had preferred to think of himself as a workingman, at best, a craftsman. “I guess I’m not much of a clotheshorse,” he said. “I’ve had this suit since 1953. But I can assure you; it’s not an artistic statement.”
The man introduced himself, and Ned recognized his name as that of a prominent designer of men’s and women’s fashions. No wonder he had noticed the suit.
“Interesting piece,” the man said, turning back to the photograph, “if a bit on the dark side. Still, I’m seriously considering buying this one. Can you tell me something about it?”
Giles could see that the fashion designer was after a little dog-and-pony show from the “artist” before committing to buying the photo. “It’s not really for sale,” he said. He hadn’t liked the man on first sight and was rarely wrong in his instincts about such things.
“Of course it’s for sale,” said the designer, gesturing toward the wall. “Don’t be ridiculous; it’s got a price tag on it. And a rather stiff one at that, if I may say so. Especially for the work of a living photographer.”
Giles laughed; he remembered how indignant wealthy, successful people often became when told that they couldn’t have something they wanted. Life in America was, finally, largely a matter of money, and in their minds everything could be purchased. “Well, you won’t have to worry about that for long,” Giles said. “It’s soon to appreciate posthumously.”
“Who’s the girl?” the man asked.
Giles looked at the designer, wondering if he deserved any further explanation; then he took another sip of wretched white wine and looked again for a very long time at the photograph. “She was one of the last of the bronco Apaches in Mexico,” he answered finally. “A mountain-lion hunter named Billy Flowers treed her with his hounds up in the Sierra Madre. It was the spring of the year 1932. She was practically naked and half starved. Flowers didn’t know what to do with her, so he brought her into the nearest town, Bavispe, Sonora. She was so wild that at first the Mexicans tethered her to a rope in the town square and threw food to her like a wild animal. Finally they put her in this jail cell. Of course, they didn’t know her name, and she wasn’t talking, so they just called her
la niña bronca.
‘The wild girl.’”
Giles finished his cup of wine in one swallow. “And that’s about it,” he said. “I happened to be in Mexico at the time myself, and I took the shot. I was just a kid. It was a long time ago. A very long time. Another lifetime really . . .” Giles turned away. “I think I’ll get another glass of wine. Excuse me, please.”
The designer grasped him by the elbow. “Wait just a minute,” he said. “What do you mean, ‘that’s about it’? What happened to her? Tell me everything.”
Giles looked steadily at the man until he released his grasp on his elbow. He was old and not in the best health, but he was damned if he would allow himself to be manhandled by strangers. He knew that the designer wanted these details in case he bought the image so that he would have an interesting story to tell his guests when they viewed it on the wall of his Long Island mansion.
“Okay,” Ned Giles said flatly. “It’s very simple. I paid the sheriff a fee for the right to photograph her. You see, after she was brought in, word spread all over the region about the capture of the Apache girl. People came from miles around wanting to see her for themselves. It was a kind of pilgrimage and
la niña bronca
became a major tourist attraction. Vendors set up stands in front of the jailhouse and sold tamales and tortillas. It was like a carnival. The sheriff allowed people to come into the jail in groups of three or four to look at the girl. Of course, all who entered were required to make a small contribution to the town jail fund for the privilege of viewing her. She was very good for business. Everyone made money off her.”