Imperial Cabinet Card Photograph of Dancing Laguna Pueblo Indians.
A mounted albumen photograph of dancing Pueblo Indians in Laguna Pueblo, New Mexico, in the impressively sized Imperial Cabinet Card format. Young Pueblo Indians are guided by elders in an initiation or "inauguration" dance ceremony as women and children spectators from the Pueblo rest against the ladder-strewn adobe walls of the Pueblo. Laguna Pueblo is located west of Albuquerque.
George Benjamin Wittick came west (from Moline, Illinois) to work as a photographer for the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad's 1878 expansion into New Mexico. He worked for the railroad until 1883. Wittick later made his living peripatetically, setting up photo studios in Gallup and other smaller New Mexico towns. In 1900 he established his last studio at Fort Wingate, New Mexico. Some believe that Wittick made the famous and only known surviving photograph of Billy the Kid.
A visually rich photograph of Native Americans in Laguna Pueblo by a noted western photographer.
Signed in the negative: "A Wittick Photo."