Ali Kazimi in Person

In this richly ironic work, a twelve-year-long exchange between Indian-born filmmaker Kazimi and Iroquois photographer Jeffrey Thomas turns into a powerful dialogue on how one relates to the Other, whether culturally or creatively. As a child in New Delhi, Kazimi was fascinated with Hollywood concepts of cowboys and Indians. Studying in Canada, he came across the legendary photographs of Edward S. Curtis, who gained fame with his portraits of Native Americans; at the same time he befriended Thomas, who views Curtis's work as “a mountain which must be crossed” in order to redefine Native American culture. Shooting Indians interrogates the very ideas behind such concepts as the photographer and the photographed, “insiders” and “outsiders,” Native Indian and immigrant Indian, and the past and the present. By journey's end it gets to the very heart of what documentary photography hopes to achieve.