Jeff Thomas (b.1956, Buffalo, New York)

Jeff Thomas (b.1956), who identifies as urban Iroquois (Haudenosaunee), made a portrait of his son in 1989 that uses humour to critique Canada’s colonial history. In the photo, Thomas’s son Bear wears a T-shirt displaying a picture of Christopher Columbus under the statement, “Founder of the New World.” Thomas and his son began these collaborative portraits in the 1980s, at a time when a generation of Indigenous artists in Canada were experimenting with postmodern critique as a form of activism. In The Bear Portraits series, Thomas photographed his son in a variety of urban locales, thereby asserting Indigenous agency in sites where it was absent and conveying the irony of contemporary Indigenous life in a settler-colonial state. Bear’s very presence in the urban streetscape and at the base of historic monuments questions the legitimacy of settler culture and is a symbol of the ongoing vitality of Indigenous cultures.  These concerns have been at the heart of Thomas’s art for over forty years, and his work is internationally recognized for its contributions to the process of decolonization.

Although he is now based in Ottawa, when Thomas was growing up, he spent time in the city of Buffalo, where he was born, and on the Six Nations of the Grand River (a First Nation community in southern Ontario). In the urban environment he encountered Indigenous cultures presented as relics of the past on monuments and in museums, but on Six Nations he learned about Haudenosaunee culture through stories and in daily life with members of the community.  Thomas’s work explores this disjuncture and is a complex dialogue about historical and contemporary representations of Indigenous people.

Storytelling is also an essential feature of Thomas’s work, and titles, captions, and narratives bring his photographs to life.  His early work from the late 1970s and early 1980s focuses on Elders of Six Nations, honoured in images such as Bert General, my step-grandfather, husking white corn, Smooth Town, Six Nations Reserve, 1980. In these photographs, he explores the cultural principles he learned from these figures. The Scouting for Indians series is about looking for traces of Indigenous existence in the city, while the Vanishing Race series reflects on the stereotypical representations of Indigeneity that he encountered, as seen in Holland Antiques, Buffalo, New York, 1982. When discussing the series featuring his son Bear, Thomas explained, “I use Bear as a marker of Indian-ness by posing him in sites where it does not exist…. These photographs reflect an Indian-ness that anthropologists would not see as authentic, yet it is very real to me.”  In 2019, Thomas was a recipient of the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts.