In the winter light of the northern plains, “Aux Ombres” follows riders who are not performing history but living it. Each December, Lakota communities in North and South Dakota gather for a 450-kilometer journey that lasts fifteen days, often in temperatures that fall to minus twenty degrees Celsius. They travel in the footsteps of Big Foot’s band, whose three hundred members, mostly women and children, were murdered at Wounded Knee on December 29, 1890. Simon Vansteenwinckel’s photographs record the Omaka Tokatakiya, the Future Generations Ride, an annual observance that joins commemoration to the practical work of teaching young people how to ride, how to care for one another, and how to carry the memory of their nation.
The book’s subject is not poverty as spectacle, a perspective that Vansteenwinckel deliberately resists. Against the reduced picture of reservation life that international media often circulate, he sets the resilience, spiritual continuity, and undefeated pride of a people who survived the worst atrocities of the nineteenth century and continue to live forward. His chosen medium—contrasty, grainy black-and-white film—gives the landscape and the riders a physical density that suits the harshness of the journey and the gravity of its purpose. A portion of the author’s royalties returns directly to the Lakota to help fund future rides.
Published by lamaindonne in 2025, the book contains 224 pages and 150 black-and-white photographs, with a hardcover binding and hot stamping. The Aveyron-based house, founded by David Fourré in 2011, specializes in authored photography and had already published a Prix Nadar winner before this volume. In November 2025, “Aux Ombres” was awarded the Prix Nadar Gens d’images, the French prize for the year’s outstanding photography book.
For collectors, that combination matters. The prize places the book within the recent history of photographic publishing in France; the substantial sequence brings the annual ride into book form; and Vansteenwinckel’s practice—documentary, film-based, grounded in the Brussels scene—gives the sequence a coherent authorial voice. The ISBN is 978-2-492920-22-6. Its sustained attention to the ride offers an alternative to seeing the participants only through images of deprivation.
