Around 1900, several photographers, including Missouri-born Beverly Bennett Dobbs and two European emigrants to the US, HG Kaiser and Albert F Johnson, followed a gold rush to Nome, Alaska. Among the clients they ushered into their portrait studios were a number of Indigenous Alaskans, whose striking pictures were later collected by the British film producer Michael G Wilson. “The portraits are remarkable for their intimacy,” says Richard Ovenden, head of the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which has recently acquired Wilson’s collection of photographs. Little is known about the subjects but Ovenden values the portraits as a record of a “moment of encounter and exchange” between “the international community of prospectors [and] the Inuit communities who had lived in peace for thousands of years”.
