Published by G Editions in 2019, Shane Balkowitsch’s Northern Plains Native Americans Vol 1: A Modern Wet Plate Perspective brings an early photographic process into sustained contact with contemporary Indigenous portraiture. This 128-page first volume presents a selection from Balkowitsch’s larger undertaking to make 1,000 wet-plate portraits of Native American sitters. Its central concern is not historical reenactment, but the representation of individuals whose present-day identities exist alongside inherited cultural histories.

Balkowitsch has worked with wet-plate collodion since 2012, treating its laborious, time-sensitive procedures as creative conditions rather than technical inconveniences. The resulting photographs carry the material and temporal associations of nineteenth-century image-making, yet their subjects belong firmly to the present. That tension is essential to the book: an old process, historically entangled with the ways Native Americans have been pictured, is redirected toward portraits intended to emphasize dignity and individuality rather than type or stereotype.

The publication gives substantial context to the photographs. A foreword and preface lead into an introduction to Balkowitsch and his working method, followed by a section on his north-light studio and the principal sequence of ambrotypes. An appendix devoted to the archiving of the images by the State Historical Society of North Dakota extends the book’s scope from photographic encounter to institutional preservation. The structure encourages the reader to consider not only the finished portrait, but also the conditions of its making and its passage into an archive.

For collectors of portraiture, process-based photography, and books concerned with representations of Indigenous peoples, the volume merits close attention because medium and subject cannot be separated here. Its significance lies in that productive difficulty: the visual authority of an early photographic method is retained, while its historical implications are placed in dialogue with contemporary presence. As Volume 1, the book also establishes the conceptual and editorial foundation of Balkowitsch’s continuing project.