Frank Fiske
Frank was a rarity among those American photographers whose work centered upon the American Indian. Unlike most artists, Fiske was a native of the Dakotas and grew up with many of the same people who later became subjects for his camera on the reservation lands bordering the Missouri River. The Lakota people of the Standing Rock agency were friends and neighbors - a part of his life and upbringing.
The son of a soldier, Fiske was born June 11, 1883, at the military post of Fort Bennett, about 30 miles north of Pierre, South Dakota.
Photography was an absorbing interest for the young Frank Fiske and by the age of 17 he had a photographic studio of his own.
His life was spent in the upper Missouri country of the Dakotas, a fact that was expressed in his lifelong passions - navigating the Missouri River as a trained steamboat pilot and photographing the people whose collective destiny was, at least in part, shaped by the rivers course; the Lakota people.
Except for a short stint in the army, Fiske's entire professional career was spent on the Northern Plains, a fact that allowed him continuous access to his photographic subjects. Driven on by his devotions, the result was a body of work (including writings) that attempted to capture the Lakota as a nation of noble warriors and not the subjugated and subdued people they had in fact become in the days following the end of the Indian wars.
Frank Fiske lived into the middle of the twentieth century, dying from complications of a stroke on July 18, 1952. He had lived to see the mighty Missouri controlled by huge earthen dams, a fact that must have been disheartening to an old riverboat pilot. But perhaps even more noteworthy to Fiske, as a man whose lifetime spanned from the period of the wild west to the modern age, was the fact that the noble Lakota warrior cavalry was forever gone.
Perhaps it gave him some solce in his later years to know that he had, through his work, captured an image of a people as they lived at the end of an era.
His photographic work has been preserved (in portfolio form) by the State Historical Society of North Dakota.
9 Item(s)
View as: Grid List
Fiske Portfolio I & II
$1,950.00
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Fiske Portfolio II
$975.00
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Plate 15 - Frank Fiske
$90.00
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Plate 19 - Mrs. Jack Treetop
$90.00
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Plate 21 - Red Fish
$90.00
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Plate 23 - Council Tipis
$90.00
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Plate 29 - War Eagle
$90.00
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Plate 30 - Mission Priests
$90.00
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Portfolio Catalog
$8.00
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9 Item(s)
View as: Grid List