{"title":"Frank Jay Haynes","description":"\u003cp\u003eFrank Jay Haynes (1853–1921) was an American photographer born in Saline, Michigan, whose practice became inseparable from the documentation of the American West in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Appointed official photographer of the Northern Pacific Railroad in 1876 and later the first official photographer of Yellowstone National Park, he built one of the most extensive photographic surveys of the region, encompassing landscape, infrastructure, and the peoples of the northern plains. His studio in Fargo and the Haynes Foundation Collection held at the Montana Historical Society preserve the principal archive of his work.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"f-jay-haynes-curley-general-custers-scout-crow-indian-1883","title":"F. JAY HAYNES, Curley, General Custer's Scout, Crow Indian, 1883 (published c. 1990s)","description":"\u003cp\u003eFolded printed card on recycled paper; black-and-white photographic reproduction to front, historical and biographical text to rear, blank interior. 12.5 × 18 cm folded, 25 × 18 cm unfolded. Ref. MHS04; from the Haynes Foundation Collection, H-037. Indigena Fine Art Publishers Ltd. \/ Montana Historical Society, c. 1990s, no later than 1996.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eCondition: Very good. Light age toning and handling, minor edge wear and small chip to lower corner of front panel. Interior clean.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA folded card, and almost the whole of its front given to one face. Curley — Ashishishe, an Apsáalooke (Crow) man — sits wrapped in a blanket, braided hair falling over his shoulders, looking past the camera rather than into it. Nothing else competes for the image. Open the card and it doubles in width: the portrait now sits beside a dense column of printed history. Turn it inward and almost everything disappears. Two blank panels, unprinted and unused.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA greeting-card format with no printed greeting.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe photograph itself is genuinely from 1883. A period albumen print held by North Dakota State University is catalogued as Curley, Crow Indian scout, General Custer's scout, photographed by Frank Jay Haynes in Montana that year and published by the Haynes Studio in Fargo. Its descriptive information derives from the index to the F. Jay Haynes photographs in the Montana Historical Society collection.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBut the photograph had already begun changing form long before this particular card existed. The Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian holds another image of Curley from a series called “Colored Cabinets of Noted Indians,” published by F. Jay Haynes \u0026amp; Brothers around 1889. Curley appears there alongside other Apsáalooke, Lakota and Niimíipuu subjects in a commercially produced sequence of cabinet cards.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSo the story is not simply photograph → archive → reproduction.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe circulation begins almost immediately.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eA sitting in 1883 becomes a photograph. The photograph becomes a cabinet card. The cabinet card becomes part of a commercial series. Another print enters a historical collection and acquires an institutional identity. More than a century after the original sitting, Indigena Fine Art Publishers returns the image to paper circulation again.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eOn this version, the photograph belongs to the Haynes Foundation Collection, H-037.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat number is a small but important transformation. A person becomes a photographic subject; the photograph becomes a collection object; the collection object becomes a numbered image available for reproduction.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNothing about Curley’s face needs to change for everything around it to be reassigned.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe reverse performs another reassignment. The portrait itself is remarkably spare, but the text attached to it is almost entirely organised around George Armstrong Custer, the Seventh Cavalry and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. It identifies Curley through his role as one of several Crow scouts who rode with the U.S. Army and describes the photograph as having been made seven years after the battle.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThat language is best understood as the card’s framing of its subject, rather than as a complete biography. The printed object tells us not only who its publishers believed Curley to be, but which part of his life they believed made the photograph legible.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eFront: a man.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eBack: Custer, Reno, the Seventh Cavalry, Little Bighorn, Haynes, the Montana Historical Society, Tucson, two telephone numbers and an accession code.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe photograph is given a bureaucracy.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eEven the date of this particular object survives indirectly through that bureaucracy. No publication year is printed, but Indigena gives its Tucson telephone number with the old 602 area code. Tucson moved into the new 520 numbering area in 1995, with the transition becoming mandatory there at the end of 1996. The number therefore places this printing no later than that changeover, making a 1990s date highly plausible.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThen, beneath almost everything else, comes the strangest sentence on the card:\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A portion of the proceeds from this card will be donated to a scholarship fund for young artists.”\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe circuit suddenly extends again.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eHaynes photographs Curley in 1883. The portrait circulates commercially in the nineteenth century. It enters an historical collection. The archive supplies the image for another printed object. Someone buys that object more than a century later, and a portion of the transaction is redirected toward an unnamed young artist.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe photograph moves outward.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eSome of the money moves forward.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIt is a remarkable mechanism to find tucked into the bottom margin of a modest piece of printed matter: an 1883 image being used to support a person whose own images may not yet exist.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe material follows the same logic. The card announces that it has been printed on recycled paper. An image preserved precisely because it survived is placed into circulation once more on material that has itself already had a previous life.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eNone of these details makes the object resolve comfortably into a single category. It is a photographic reproduction, historical document, educational object, commercial card, miniature biography, institutional reproduction and fundraising mechanism. Fold it shut and it becomes almost entirely a photograph again. Open it and the administrative structure appears. Open it the other way and there is only blank paper.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe portrait has remained remarkably stable.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eIts assignment keeps changing.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Indigena Fine Art Publishers Ltd. \/ Montana Historical Society","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":54455748133202,"sku":null,"price":125.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0991\/5636\/1554\/files\/Haynes_FrankJay.Artistcard_Curley_1883_.Unknown.jpg?v=1788082703"}],"url":"https:\/\/thenewrare.com\/collections\/frank-jay-haynes.oembed","provider":"The New Rare","version":"1.0","type":"link"}