Nowadluk Ootenna

Among the surviving Lomen studio plates of Nowadluk — the Iñupiaq woman of the Wales and Port Clarence country whom the captions called Nora — one stands apart: she is smiling, openly and without apology, her long hair loose over her shoulders. In the portrait photography of the early 1900s this is genuinely rare. Exposures were slow, sitters were coached into stillness, and photographers of Native subjects in particular favored gravity, composing faces into the mournful “vanishing race” mood their customers expected. A smile held for the camera was a small act of collaboration between sitter and photographer — and, on her side of the lens, of self-possession.

The smile matters because of what the studio system did with women like her. Nome's photographers marketed images of their Iñupiaq neighbors to distant buyers, and Nowadluk was among the most photographed, labeled an “Eskimo Belle” on prints sold far from anyone who knew her. The solemn plates could be mistaken for the ethnographic “types” the trade wanted; the smiling one cannot. It records a particular mood on a particular day — a young married woman of the reindeer country, a Sunday-school teacher, amused by something now unrecoverable, perhaps the photographer, perhaps the whole elaborate occasion of being photographed.

She did not grow old: the 1918 influenza pandemic swept the Seward Peninsula and took her with it. That loss gives the smiling plate its weight. Where the companion portrait holds her composure, this one holds her warmth — a glimpse of the living, particular woman inside the studio's commercial captions. Nothing about the smile was staged solemnity or sales copy; it is simply Nora, one bright moment out of a short life, carried forward first on glass and now in paint.