?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 700 - $ 1,000
(NATIVE CULTURE) A group of 42 photo booth portraits, some of Navajo individuals, including about 15 of the same subject, Erma Mae Bitsui (née Diswood). Silver prints, 32 of images measuring approximately 2x1 1/2 inches (5x3.8 cm.), one 2 1/2x2 inches (6.3x5 cm.), 5 are 3x2 1/4 inches (7.6x5.7 cm.), and 4 are 4 3/4x3 inches (12.1x7.6 cm.), about 30 with inscriptions in ink on recto or verso. 1941-61
While not noted as such, many of the subjects in these photographs (presumably friends and some certainly family) were attending a Native American boarding school. The compiler of the collection, Erma Diswood Bitsui Batesse, was born Erma Mae Diswood in 1935 to Larin and Eva Diswood, in Fruitland, New Mexico. She attended the Albuquerque Indian School (AIS) as early as 1946. Her mother moved to Brigham City, Utah in 1951, for a job at the town's Intermountain Indian School, which had opened the year before, and Larin stayed behind to manage the family farm. Erma likely moved to Brigham City sometime in 1952 or 1953, as she appeared in the AIS yearbook in 1952 and is seen at Box Elder High School in Brigham City in 1953. In Brigham City, Erma lived with her mother and brother in a dorm on the Intermountain campus, and she was one of very few people of color at Box Elder High. Erma graduated from Box Elder in 1955 and married Nelson Bitsui in 1956. Erma may have started working at Intermountain soon after graduation, and she was certainly working there as of 1962. By 1971, she was living in Crystal City, Arizona and working as an instructional aide in the child guidance department at the Crystal Boarding School. As of 1987 she was an Active Reading Teacher at Many Farms High School, also an Indian boarding school. Erma and Nelson had at least five children together and they eventually divorced, likely sometime in the 1970s. Erma's second marriage was to Stanley Battese, possibly in the late 1970s or early 1980s. Battese is a listed artist whose work is held by several institutions; at the time he enters Erma's life, he is a recovering alcoholic working as a school teacher.
