Lens Blog: An Indian from India meets Indians from the US

It gets complicated when people ask Annu Palakunnathu Matthew where she’s from. Born in London, raised in India and now living in the United States, her journey is twisty, her accent a hard-to-place blend.

“When I say I’m from Rhode Island, people don’t want to believe me,” she said. “Then when I say I’m Indian, I have to clarify that, because people think I’m Native American. I quickly have to say I’m an Indian from India.”

The confusion is expected and goes back more than 500 years.

“It’s all because Christopher Columbus went looking for the Indies and found North America instead,” said Ms. Matthew, professor of photography at the University of Rhode Island in Kingston. “Then he named the people here Indians.”

That confusion, as well as what it says about colonial history, race relations and stereotypes, inspired her to do “An Indian From India,” a series of diptychs in which she pairs classic 19th century images of Native Americans with portraits of herself in the same pose and background. The idea, though humorous at first glance, is actually a challenging mediation on the legacies of colonial pasts that were marked by painful attempts to “civilize” native people — if not reduce them to nameless types — while idealizing white colonizers.

The idea for the diptychs came after Ms. Matthew began to explore 19th century photographs of Native Americans and came across a portrait of a mother and child in an armchair that was similar to one she owned. She mimicked the pose, then placed herself (and her stepchild) into the original image’s background via Photoshop in order to make the comparison as seamless as possible.