Photographing the Baby in a Sioux Village, Rushville, Neb.

In a Lakota camp on the outskirts of Rushville, the railhead for the Pine Ridge Agency, a group of Anglo visitors photographs an infant in its cradleboard. Solomon D. Butcher, in turn, makes their act of looking the true subject of his own composition. The result is a self referential document of cultural viewership, one of several such scenes recorded by the Butcher studio during a campaign in the spring of 1908.