Middlebury College
Middlebury, VT 05753

Open to the Public

Image of three men sitting next to a totem pole

Elbridge W. Merrill (1870-1929), a talented professional photographer from New England, spent thirty years in the town of Sitka, Alaska documenting the life of its multiethnic population: Tlingit Indians, Russian Creoles and Euro-Americans. Merrill’s images of the local indigenous people’s ceremonial and daily life are particularly striking. They are both beautiful and a major source of historical information on the rich culture of the Tlingit people. The artist clearly enjoyed excellent rapport with his subject who commissioned him to photograph funerals and memorial potlatches as well as create their portraits. Unlike some of the other Euro-American photographers, who took pictures of Alaska Natives Merrill, neither romanticized them nor exoticized them as savages.

Drawing on his long-term research on the Merrill photographic collection, extensive archival research and ethnographic fieldwork in Sitka between 1979 and 2022, Sergei Kan will discuss Merrill’s portrayal of the Tlingit and briefly compare it with some other major photographers operating in southeastern Alaska between the late 19th century and the first few decades of the 20th.

Sergei Kan is Professor of Anthropology at Dartmouth College as well as an affiliated faculty of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Research at Harvard University. He is the author of several books and articles including Symbolic Immortality: The Tlingit Potlatch of the Nineteenth Century (1989), Memory Eternal: Tlingit Culture and Russian Orthodox Christianity Through Two Centuries (1999) and A Russian American Photographer in Tlingit Country: Vincent Soboleff in Alaska (2013).

Location: 75 Shannon Street, Room 224

Sponsored by:
Anthropology

Contact Organizer

Nevins, Marybeth
mnevins@middlebury.edu
(802) 443-5019