Zig Jackson

American (United States, West)

Zig Jackson is a photographer of Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara descent.  Jackson’s work focuses on the contemporary lives of Native Americans in  the United States. His photographs chart a cultural frontier that is unfamiliar to most Americans today but is deeply personal to Jackson.  Raised on a reservation in North Dakota, his early education came from  the government Indian boarding school system. His images use humor,  pathos, and close observation to confront historic loss, tourism and  spectatorship, and the challenges of daily life facing Native American communities. Jackson states “To mainstream Americans, we’re curiosities  or specters of a vanished people. Indians, however, are everywhere in  popular culture, from the fashion of Ralph Lauren to sports mascots and  gaming characters. Still…few have seen a Native American in the flesh.  The goal of my work, then, is to close the gap between perception and  reality.” In 2005 Jackson became the first Native American photographer to have work collected by the Library of Congress’s Prints and Photographs  Division. Currently he is a professor of photography at Savannah College  of Art and Design.