A Danish Photographer of Idaho Indians:
Benedicte Wrensted

By Joanna Cohan Scherer (University of Oklahoma Press, 2006, $29.95)

With the publication of A Danish Photographer of Idaho Indians: Benedicte Wrensted, author Joanna Cohan Scherer pulls back the cloak of obscurity from the life and achievements of a truly remarkable female photographer. Danish-born Benedicte Wrensted (1859-1949), who, in 1895, at age 35, emigrated from Denmark to southeast Idaho, created an invaluable and fascinating photographic record of the Northern Shoshone, Lemhi and Bannock tribes of American Indians who live at the Fort Hall Indian Reservation near Pocatello, Idaho.

"Putting a woman back into American photographic history is in itself sufficient reason for resurrecting the photography of Benedicte Wrensted," Scherer writes in the book’s foreword. "She represents the large number of women photographers of American Indians whom history has not treated kindly with remembrance."

Wrensted enjoyed many years as a commercial photographer in Pocatello, where  local residents, both Anglo and Native American, came to her studio to sit for formal portraits. For the American Indians, her photographs document a period of rapid cultural transition.

In this scholarly book, Scherer, an anthropologist and former illustrations researcher with the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History’s Handbook of North American Indians, reveals the importance of Wrensted’s photographs in a number of areas. "They can be appreciated as visual art--as evocative symbols of American Indian icons. They can be viewed as social documents of the Shoshone-Bannock people at a particular time in history and as records of local, family or individual history," Scherer writes.

This beautifully designed volume reproduces a substantial number of Wrensted’s photographs, along with a detailed description of each image, including the names of the subjects, their biographical data and an ethnographic analysis of their Native attire.

The book represents years of meticulous detective work that involved library and archival research, interviewing Wrensted’s relatives, as well as the descendants of her Native American sitters. "I have pieced together a picture of the photographer and her intentions," Scherer writes, "...and the cultural, historical and ideological contexts in which the photographs were taken and later viewed."

Readers of A Danish Photographer of Idaho Indians: Benedicte Wrensted travel back to the railroad town of Pocatello in the late 1800s and into the very studio where many Native Americans sought out the photographer. In addition to Wrensted, Scherer explores the lives of a number of her sitters--both Native American and Anglo American. 

One individual Scherer focuses on is Bannock tribal member Pat Tyhee, who Wrensted photographed in either 1898 or 1899, in two photos, one in his Indian clothing and the other in European-style clothing, showing his self-identification in both worlds.

Another of the many poignant photographs in the book is of a group of Northern Shoshone men wearing Native ornaments. One of the men, George Edmo, proudly wears for the photograph the same hairpipe-and-brass-bead necklace that his father, Arimo, owned and had worn when he was photographed years earlier.

"Today, images by Benedicte Wrensted are in many Shoshone-Bannock homes, and the stories they bring to mind are related and passed on to the next generation," former Shoshone-Bannock Tribes Museum Director Bonnie Wuttunee-Wadsworth writes in the book’s introduction. "Today, the pictures have a new cultural significance. In them, the Shoshone- Bannock have found the faces of their forebears."

At age 53 in 1912, Wrensted ended her career as a photographer and moved to California where she built a house in the Hollywood Hills. She left no diary and no records, only a collection of photographs widely distributed in private and public hands. Through nearly two decades of research, Joanna Scherer has secured for these treasures their proper place of recognition and importance in the visual history of the United States.