Ah-Weh-Eyu

This is the third painting of Ah-Weh-Eyu — Goldie Jamison Conklin, Seneca of the Heron Clan — in the series, and it follows a different kind of photograph. Her full story is told with her studio portrait; the river tableau shows the postcard trade at work. The 1909 sitting behind this painting turned her to profile, the pose portrait studios of the day reserved for their most classical compositions. J.L. Blessing of Salamanca, New York photographed her again and again between 1908 and 1914, and the surviving prints show how deliberately the studio varied her: full face, three-quarter, profile, indoors and out.

The profile view says something the other poses cannot. A frontal portrait meets its viewer; a profile is studied, the way medals and cameos are studied, and the choice tells us the studio understood exactly how photogenic its model was. She wears a beaded headband and a single upright feather — studio costume of the era, assembled for the camera rather than drawn from any one ceremony — and the print sold alongside her other cards to a public that rarely learned her name. The captions that did survive kept it in both languages: Ah-Weh-Eyu, Pretty Flower.

Away from the studio she was Goldie Jamison, seventeen that year, of the Allegany Territory of the Seneca Nation — a working model paid for sittings like this one, later a wife, a mother of six, and a farmer at Silver Creek. Painted over gold leaf a century on, the profile joins her other two portraits on this site as a record of the same fact from three angles: one young Seneca woman, photographed more often than almost any of her contemporaries, whose name stayed attached to her face because she was known, working, and paid in her own community.