When Aaron Huey first visited South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation in 2005, he didn’t expect that it would be a world-altering experience. He began the project as an objective photojournalist’s look at poverty in America. But after spending eight years documenting the residents of Pine Ridge, his professional and personal outlook has changed dramatically.
Fortunately, this is not a thought-experiment. Aaron Huey has put in the requisite time, and spent years among the Oglala Lakota in South Dakota. You might have heard of the Pine Ridge reservation before, but you’ve never seen it like this.
When Huey first arrived, he was treated like all the other journalists who trickled onto the reservation—shunned from the stereotypes they hope to quickly capture before fleeing back to comfort zones. Now, many call him their brother, uncle, friend. They are all his relations.
A few months after the Lens piece was published, Mr. Huey received over 40 letters from students at the Jesuit-run Red Cloud High School. Many of the letters asked why he couldn’t show families like theirs: sober, employed, “normal.” The students wanted him to balance the story and to include them. The letters stuck with Mr. Huey.
Link: Broken Treaties: Aaron Huey’s Pine Ridge Billboard Project – LightBoxFor the past six years, photographer Aaron Huey has trained his camera on these problems. But, he says, it took him five years to understand what the real story was
Link: 500 Photographers: Photographer #214: Aaron HueyAaron Huey, 1975, USA, has done a vast amount of projects. In 2002 he walked 3,349 miles across the United States. He regularly shoots for the National Geographic magazine, The New Yorker and Harper’s amongst many others.
PDN:
Our choice of new and emerging photographers to watch.
Gmb Akash, Aneta Bartos, Maxine Beuret, Julie Blackmon, Marco Bohr, Lane Coder, Kathryn Cook, Pierre Crocquet, Victoria J. Dean, Brad Dececco, Autumn De Wilde, Rena Effendi, Serkan Emiroglu, Ditte Isager, Jamie Isaia, Shuli Hallak, Kathryn Hillier, Dorothy Hong, Aaron Huey, Brian Lesteberg, David Leventi, Debora Mittelstaedt, Marcus Nilsson, Brigitte Sire, Alys Tomlinson, Brian Ulrich, Anna Wolf, Sarah Wilmer, Andrea Wyner, Alvaro Ybarra Zavala.
Here.