Q&A: Photographer Matt Hamon on Montana, Authenticity, and Problems of the ‘Exotic’

Matt Hamon stumbled upon the Buffalo Bridge Project by accident—he was researching tips on butchering elk—but this group of primitive-skills devotees eventually became the subjects of his stunning photo series The Gleaners.

Collaboration is the group’s normal method: they spend six weeks every year assisting the Native American hunters in an annual buffalo hunt in southern Montana. Hamon (a northern California native who teaches fine art at the University of Montana) persuaded the Buffalo Bridgers to work with him, too. He is quick to point out that this work is not photojournalism. Hamon’s process—which often includes a strobe, to achieve the effect of a more formal portrait—requires cooperation and time.

The resulting photos are haunting yet comforting, timeless yet anachronistic, suffused with a sense of peaceful purpose and yet shot through with tremendous tension. The photos have an “iconographic sensibility,” Hamon says, and ring with the echoes of evocative antecedents in both frontier mythology and Western art. (The title is lifted from a famous 1857 work by from Jean-Francois Millet, which depicted three peasant women stooping to collect stray stalks of wheat left after the harvest.)

Hamon’s sensational yet deeply human images seem to encapsulate the history of the American West, in all its beauty and complexity, its contradictions and underlying tensions around questions of authenticity, integrity, and ownership that burn as strong as ever today.

Below is a condensed and edited version of my video chat with Hamon in April 2017.

-Tim Sohn

Tim Sohn: How did you discover the Buffalo Bridge Project?

Matt Hamon: When I moved from northern California, I was fascinated by the visibility of hunting here in Montana, of driving down the road during hunting season and seeing elk draped over the tops of cars. So I began tagging along with some of my colleagues. They taught me to shoot and hunt, and now the primary source of meat in my house for my wife and two children is wild game that we hunt. So I was looking for some advice online about butchering elk when I ran into a post from one of the Buffalo Bridge folks. I thought it was interesting, so I made email contact and started developing a relationship from there. And now I’ve joined them for the past two hunts.

TS: How long did you spend there this year, 2017?

MH: About ten days. I usually make two trips, and I live in camp and I pitch in. I think this is another reason I have the relationship and access—if I show up and people are shoveling, I pick up a shovel. So I’m typically there about ten days, living in camp and photographing. And then I make a return visit to show them the edits and give them prints.

All photos by Matt Hamon. Click here for the Jungles in Paris slideshow and Tim Sohn’s story about frontier revivalists in Montana.

TS: What’s their camp like?

MH: There’s a landowner there who used to run a little tepee campsite. He has some pasture and paddocks and a barn and they lease it for their time there. It’s right across the road from this grid work of public lands and National Park lands, so there are a few corridors there that the buffalo migrate through. But they move kind of at random, so it can be a lot of waiting.

TS: You’re not the only person who’s approached them about a project like this, right?

MH: Right. One of the unfortunate aspects is that they have been approached relentlessly by reality TV production companies. So there was the potential for them to take the money and make their project larger. But they’ve really tried to maintain the integrity of what they’re doing. Their style and aesthetic are authentic to them, as a group of people committed to living and working outside the standards of production and consumption. They face the world with a utilitarian outlook. And they’re also sensitive to the fact that it’s complicated when you have the Native American aspect. The Natives are the hunters. Buffalo Bridge is mostly white people interacting with that culture.

TS: Would you say that they’re, in a way, already acting out a role?

MH: They would object to that. One writer at CNN made reference to their aesthetic: beards and flannel, ‘hipster’ or whatever, like they seemed fashionable. My response was, well, that may be an appropriate reference to make for your audience, but the reality is it grows out of their commitment to this life and this outlook. And it comes back, again, to utilitarianism. They’ll say, ‘OK, we need thread, I’m going to figure out how to make thread from bison, fibers, plant fibers or whatever.’ In regard to their philosophy, it seems authentic.

“I’m guilty of the historic problem of photography: the exploitation of the exotic. My answer is to admit to the problem and present it in an interesting way.”

TS: It’s still complex—lots of layers there.

MH: With much of my subject matter, I’m guilty of the historic problem of photography, which is the exploitation of the exotic. I think I’m aware of that, and hopefully in these images there’s ultimately greater depth than the pure sensationalism of the image.  The only answer I’ve found is to admit to the problem of photography as a medium, and to present it in an interesting way. But I guess I’m so committed to the process that I’m not willing to [completely] surrender to that problem.

TS: And it seems that for you, part of getting at that is by approaching it as image-making rather than photojournalism.

MH: My entry point and interest in the medium is closer to fine art, in which you’re creating, rather than doing objective observation—as absurd as it is to suggest that photography ever functions objectively. So when I first approached them, I described myself as a portrait photographer, as someone interested in the intimacy you can achieve by standing immediately close to someone, a type of intimacy reserved for family members and lovers. You can really study someone in a carefully crafted photograph…that was my initial impulse.

TS: It must take a lot of time, achieving that intimacy.

MH: That’s part of my process. I need to be there, and it takes a while. I don’t even take my camera out. After a while they’re like, ‘Dude, where’s your camera?’ Eventually I’ll bring it out, shoot casually, observationally, until once in awhile I see a backdrop or a presentation that has an iconographic sensibility. Another way that I often navigate these relationships with anyone that I shoot is that I give something back. So I make archival prints for everyone I photograph and mail them to them.

“I’m interested in the intimacy you can achieve by standing immediately close to someone, an intimacy reserved for family members and lovers.”

TS: The title of the series alludes to this painterly idea of more formal, composed scenes.

MH: I shoot digitally, with a medium format digital back, but my process is slow and selective. And I usually bring in a light to get an aesthetic separation of subject and background. But it’s not rigidly posed—it’s more of a pause. I’m interested in that gray area between staged editorial portraiture and reality, to bring that reverent light and attention to common situations and people. And I think the old genre paintings like “The Gleaners,” by Millet, was sort of doing that too: reverently addressing normal people, rather than aristocracy. So philosophically and conceptually, that’s where I start. But when it gets down to brass tacks, it’s about the beauty and the intimacy.

TS: And then there are the facial expressions—not a lot of smiling.

MH: A lot of my portrait projects start out with people smiling. I intentionally coach that out of them, because a smile to me kills the complexity of an image—there’s such an immediate sense of awareness on the viewer’s part, of this person knowingly being photographed.

TS: Do you see this as an ongoing project?

MH: Well, now some of them will stop and stay at my house on the way to the hunt, so I consider a lot of them friends, which is unexpected. But it has motivated me to continue to revisit the hunt every year.  I think it would be nice to expand to the other cultures surrounding it: the tribal hunters, game management, and the ranching community.

TS: What are your thoughts on photographing the tribal hunters?

MH: The first year I intentionally avoided shooting any of them, because I understand how Native Americans in our country have been exoticized and all that. But in the second year, you’ll start to see some of the tribal hunters appear, because I started to communicate with them and get their permission, and share images of the hunt. I mean, ideally I think it would be someone from the tribes photographing them. Having worked with a magazine in Germany, I see there can be this assumption the Germans had that Native Americans would be in buckskins and headdresses. But you look at the images and it’s the gleaners who are dressed that way! The Native hunters are dressed in Gore-tex and camo.

TS: And how have the Buffalo Bridge folks responded to the project?

MH: There was a really rough patch after I initially shot them and the CNN piece came out. I was close to being voted off the island. I also started sharing some of my profits with them. The success of those images is partially due to my interest and technical skill, but really it’s because they’re investing time and energy and considerable expense to manage that camp. So two-thirds of every payment I get goes to them.  

TS: If you were a photojournalist, this would bring up some ethical questions.

MH: Many of the journalism students who take my fine-art photo class here at the university are appalled. I can understand that on the one hand, but that wasn’t the initial premise on which I approached them to make images. Of course I’m not the only photographer who has attended the camp. But I’m certainly the only one who says, ‘Hey, I’m getting paid. Do you want your cut?’ It’s complicated. For journalism around more political issues, the subjects are in theory gaining from having their story told. But in this case they don’t really have anything to gain.

TS: How do they deal with other producers and photographers now?

Last Sunday, my friend and I decided to work off those homemade pop-tarts from Ted's Bulletin with a casual walk along one of the Rock Creek Park trails, which wind from Silver Spring through Adams Morgan and Georgetown all the way down to the Potomac. We later learned that we accidentally walked along the paved bike trail instead of the shady foot paths snaking through the trees and hills. While the constant shouting from bikers that they were fast-approaching on our left got a bit redundant, we definitely didn't mind the extra sun on our Vitamin D-starved shoulders.

We stumbled along an old cemetery nested in the hillside, the tombstones dotting the green like life-size chess pieces.  

  It may seem morbid to some, but I find ancient cemeteries so peaceful and beautiful. My friend and I tried to find a way to get to the tombstones but couldn't find an opening. Next time, I may just have to embrace my inner Huck Fink and jump the chain-linked fence. Then spend the day wandering the hill and piecing together weathered, fragmented epitaphs to create stories of men and women long-gone. 

And of course I had to include a photograph of the Dumbarton Bridge (also known as the Q Street Bridge and Buffalo Bridge) because of its magnificent choice of animals guarding its arch. For those who don't know me, I have a somewhat embarrassing "favorite animal"...the American bison. I blame my father's family vacations to our country's numerous national parks.