"Keemosabee, me no like say cheese for that white man Curtis."

Tlingit photographer and lithographer Larry McNeil has some issues with Edward S. Curtis: his images, his methods — and his notion, in the late-19th century, that the proud American Indian would soon be gone forever . In some of McNeil's prints and photo illustrations that read like comic panels, he uses words and pictures to evoke the legacies of Curtis, the Lone Ranger, and Tonto.

In other works, McNeil incorporates images of ravens, Pontiac hood ornaments, family photos, and stealth bombers. Of the several series shown on his Web site, the oldest dates from the early 1980s. It contains beautiful pictures of Tlingit elders gathering grasses for basket making. These pictures were shot as part of a multiyear commercial assignment for the Alaska Native Arts Foundation.

McNeil grew up in southeastern Alaska. He taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in the 1990s and, for the past decade, has been an instructor at Boise State University in Idaho. His accolades include the National Geographic's All Roads Photography award.

Pasatiempo spoke with McNeil at his home in Boise.

Pasatiempo: How long have you been dealing with the Lone Ranger and Tonto in your work?

Larry McNeil: It's been a few years. I had a Tonto comic for years, and I finally had the opportunity to do something with it at Tamarind [Institute, in Albuquerque] for a project called Migrations [Migrations: New Directions in Native American Art]. It was a pair of lithographs, and that kind of opened the door to other stuff.

Pasa: I see both serious and humorous writings accompanying many of your images. For example, one image in your Fly by Night Mythology series includes the words: "In the true spirit of white man, I stole this car in my search for america. Just call it manifested destiny."

McNeil: Yeah, but, of course, I also write formally. I've been asked to contribute chapters to various books. I have three publications this year where I'm writing on issues having to do with Native identity.

Pasa: Your work, in part, is about American mythology.

McNeil: I've always loved the idea of trying to figure out who Americans really are. I think that American identity is easily quantified from history books. But there's also that more nebulous mythology of Americans, and sometimes that has more influence on a person's self-perception than actual history — and I think that's where a lot of fun stuff is.

Pasa: Your photos often feature ravens. Do you see them as totemic?

McNeil: Oh, yes, absolutely, and as the all-American bird, too. In our indigenous culture, he's a trickster and part of our creation story and really at the core of who we are. He takes the idea of the sacred and makes fun of it, so the underlying theme is that you don't take yourself too seriously — even with your spiritual beliefs.

Pasa: Edward Curtis is another good target for you.

McNeil: I've always had problems with his whole premise, the "vanishing race" thing. He made the assumption that Native Americans would be extinct. A lot of times I'll be doing presentations in London or New York, and people come up afterward to chat, and one of the most common things I hear is, "Wow, I didn't know you guys were still alive. I thought you were all vanished." I think of all the elements in our Western culture that affects that sensibility [the greatest] is Edward Curtis making that whole body of work, where it's implied that Native Americans would vanish, so I thought I'd do something
to counteract that.

Pasa: What are you working on now?

McNeil: I'm still working on the Tonto stuff.

Pasa: What mediums are you using to pursue the theme?

McNeil: It's digital photography — scanning stuff in and doing manipulations on the computer, and that's combined with 4 x 5 film images.

Pasa: You appear in some pieces, like the one called Masks, Masks, and More Masks, with a big camera on a tripod.

McNeil: Yeah, it's one of my old field cameras, and I'm using Polaroid film, the type that gives you a negative. They just discontinued it this spring, which is kind of sad, but I still have 10 boxes, so at least I have enough to finish my project.

I'm at this weird place, because I've been teaching digital photography at Boise State, so on one hand I feel like I helped with the demise of film, but I still teach film as well.

Pasa: You're still using an enlarger?

McNeil: I am, and teaching it. That's the price our students have to pay to get into a digital class. I think that's the only way to learn photography, really.

Pasa: There are black brush marks on the edges of many of the photos. Are you painting on emulsion?

McNeil: I am. For a lot of the work, I was doing palladium prints, because I couldn't get the tonal range I wanted to with the raven using silver prints. I learned palladium printing on a scholarship with David Michael Kennedy there in Santa Fe.

Pasa: There's a photo of a highway in your Sacred Art portfolio, and it has the text, "I found some sacred chrome flashing by on the sacred frontage road. The spirits are with me today. I can feel it. This was made in Santa Fe, where my son was born."

McNeil: That whole series is a sacred series. Over the years, I get asked by curators to participate in exhibitions having to do with sacred art, and that always seemed peculiar to me, as an artist. I never told anyone I was sacred. So, anyway, I was starting to get self-conscious about putting my work in these sacred shows, so I thought I should just make a body of work for all these people who want sacred art.

Pasa: These text elements also appear in Fly by Night Mythology, along with images of ravens, Tonto, canoes, fish, and old family photos.

McNeil: The narrative has become a critical part of the work, and that's where a lot of it started — from journals I have. Writing comes first for me a lot of times.

Pasa: One of the pictures with text says, "Edward Curtis dressed a pair of Tlingit warriors in some costumes from the trunk of his car ... it was the last photo he ever made."

McNeil: I think that's true, in a sense. He never photographed the Tlingit people. If you look at his huge body of work, Tlingits are conspicuously missing, and if you look at them from a visual standpoint, they're just really powerful. On the other hand, our own culture has such a strong sense of ownership. My theory is, he probably did try to make photographs there, and maybe he got snotty to the wrong people, and they knocked him out or something.