As a speaker of an endangered language, B.A. Van Sise wanted to create a photo series that would raise awareness about the endangered languages of the United States. The series, “On the National Language: The Poetry of America’s Endangered Tongues,” is also a book and on display at the Skirball Cultural Center in Los Angeles. It features conceptual portraits of endangered language speakers, in which each portrait is inspired by a particular word from that speaker’s endangered language.
To find portrait subjects for his series, Van Sise first reached out to cultural groups, tribes, and nations. But, he says, often the representatives identified by the organizations to photograph couldn’t even speak the endangered language. So, he took a different tack and contacted an endangered language revitalizer; then he would ask that subject to recommend another portrait subject in their community, and so on. “It’s a small world; everybody knows everybody,” he says, “and it helped me both to find good and qualified subjects and also helped get over the trust gap in a project like this.”
In general, the words that inspired the conceptual portraits were suggested by the subject, Van Sise explains. “I’d ask them for a few words in their language that were particularly poetic or meaningful or hard to translate into English,” he explains. Then he’d follow up with a few portrait concepts that he and the subject would discuss. “I wanted to provide the sizzle that sells the steak, that gets people revved up about these languages,” Van Sise says, “that gets young people in the community wanting to learn about the language and everybody else to think hard about what we stand to lose if these languages fall to silence.”
Amanda Arnold is a senior editor.
