Oct 10, 2013 - Sale 2324

Sale 2324 - Lot 1

Price Realized: $ 18,750
?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 2,000 - $ 3,000
A WARM AND DETAILED PORTRAIT OF INUPIAQ LIFE A HUNDRED YEARS AGO (ALASKA.) Bernardi, Suzanne Rognon; additional photographs by Jack Rognon. Story of a Whale Hunt. 31 photographs, various sizes, mounted in an album with extensive manuscript text. [40] pages. Oblong 8vo, original plain cloth, minor wear. Wales, AK, circa 1901-02

Additional Details

Suzanne Rognon Bernardi and her brother Jack Rognon came to Alaska in 1901, where she worked as a teacher and missionary. This album depicts a whale hunt and other scenes of Iñupiaq life in the village of Wales, at the westernmost tip of the Alaskan coast.
Bernardi compiled several of these albums, all of them titled "Story of a Whale Hunt," but each with different text and different arrangements of photographs. One photograph (illustrated) shows a man chest-deep in a half-submerged whale carcass on the shore, with a note reading "Butcher holding his wet garment in his mouth to avoid cutting it with his knife." Reference: Susan Fair, "Story of a Whale Hunt: Suzanne Rognon Bernardi's Photographs and Observations of Iñupiaq Whaling, Wales, Alaska, 1901–1902," in Indigenous Ways to the Present: Native Whaling in the Western Arctic, pages 357-386.