On the National Language

Published September 2024

Schiffer Publishing, 2024

176 pages | $50.00

the wind erased their tracks 

— Apache for “died” 

B.A. Van Sise’s new book, On the National Language, is a paean to the people who are trying to save and revitalize languages, endangered or soon to be. Of the 7,000 spoken or signed languages existing, more than 3,000 of them are in danger of having the wind erase their tracks. Saving languages, Van Sise says, is the “search for home.”

Van Sise—a linguist, photographer, and poet—spent three years traveling to 48 U.S. states, using his charm and persistence to cajole more than 100 people into participating in his collaborative portrait project. He asked each speaker to suggest a meaningful word or poem that became the generative idea for the portrait, carefully crafted and composed, usually humorous, rich with internal narrative, sometimes literal but often metaphorical. 

The book’s design pairs a paragraph about the history of the language, the person featured, and the chosen word or phrase. Van Sise is as good a writer as he is a photographer, so his poetic and lyrical text and images are intertwined. In his hands, photography and poetry are fundamentally the same medium. Both are arbitrary selections of a moment. A condensing of an expression. A snippet of an idea. Both work best when they elicit an emotion from the viewer. 

Color also is a character in Van Sise’s photographs while light is the protagonist. He isn’t afraid to bury most of the image in deep shadow, only lighting the essence. Other times he blasts the scene with light and color so bright it is hard to look at. 

But he doesn’t just play with light and color, he also plays with the language of documentary photography, pushing at its edges, asking us to reconsider our definition, even suggesting that the genre must evolve to survive. Throughout the book, he intersperses straight documentary images—drawing on his background as a photojournalist—with ones that are best described as conceptual or creative documentary, discarding allegiance to truth, authenticity, and sometimes even gravity. 

He challenges us to figure out which are which and he delights in fooling us. Some images that we swear are manipulated are not. For example, in the cover image, Maggie McGhee, who spent five years learning Lakota and now teaches it at a local school, chose a Lakota word, unkupelo (we are coming home). She stands holding her child, in front of a close up (eyes to lips) of the massive Crazy Horse Memorial in Crazy Horse, SD. She is photographed only from the waist up, a small speck in the dead center of the frame. The disparity in size screams Photoshop. But no. Van Sise and McGhee climbed the memorial to create this photograph. 

Or another image that features Barbara Amos, who is helping to revitalize Cup’ig, a dialect of the Yup’ik language, still spoken only by a few elders of Nunivak Island, Alaska. She sits on a rock ledge, laughing. Behind her a whale’s tail pops out of the water. Because of the other more fantastical images in the book, our first inclination is that this image was constructed. It’s not hard to digitally add a whale’s tail. But like the cover image, it’s not. Van Sise was just lucky and quick enough to capture the action. 

In some of the more obviously manipulated images we might even assume he used AI. 

For example, one image features two people, one facing the camera and the other sitting on the tailgate of an SUV. The image is a mash of dark blues and greens, reflected in a background of brilliant green Northern Lights. This is obviously a constructed image and the Northern Lights background screams AI, a technology that would have created it in minutes. Rather than defaulting to AI, Van Sise spent days stitching his images together because even for his more conceptual or constructed images, he believes in adhering to the photographic principle that all digital manipulation should be something that could have been done in the darkroom. Think Jerry Uelsmann. 

Through his portraits and text, Van Sise is saying that spoken and visual languages are important, regardless of the process employed to revitalize or create them. And we should continue to protect them, or in Seneca, dëyethiyë ‘ nyadö:g.

—Michelle Bogre