Photo Crush: Aaron Huey

I’ve come across Aaron Huey’s work before but never really paid much attention until I discovered his series about the Pine Ridge Lakota reservation through the NZZ Tableau (by the way, I love this feature in the NZZ so much!). I checked out his website and blog and also found this really cool, inspiring interview in the New York Times. Once again a reminder that it pays to invest in long term projects… They’re bad for your wallet but good for your soul.

Here are a few photos, and some excerpts from his interview.

All photos Copyright Aaron Huey

Aaron Huey arrived on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota at the start of a self-assigned photographic road trip to document poverty in America. The poverty he found on the reservation stopped him cold. “It was emotionally devastating,” Mr. Huey said. “I‘d call my wife late at night crying.”

Overwhelmed by the poverty — and at the same time by scenes of people trying to maintain the Lakota way of life — Mr. Huey abandoned the rest of his nationwide project to focus on Pine Ridge. Five years later, he’s still photographing on the reservation, which includes the Wounded Knee massacre site.

“I went back  because the families invited me back, and because I was so floored by what I had seen that I couldn’t stop thinking about it. Now, I go back because they are family, and because I haven’t found the end of the story. It seems to get more confusing each time I return. I am not getting closer to a conclusion. It just is what it is. My photos are a witness, not a solution. They are the dark and the light and every struggle between.”

“I started by not shooting many photos. I hung out, and I always asked the young kids who took me in to tell me what they thought the world needed to know about them. In my first interactions, I let them guide the story. They needed to feel like someone cared about them. They needed to be heard. So I listened. I spent a lot of time not working. I watched movies with them, ate meals with them. Sometimes I’d beat myself up about not shooting enough photos. My eyes would get tired and I’d stop “seeing” photos. But I believe that it was all for the best. Over time, it has helped me go much deeper.”

“After I spent several trips with these gang kids and did my first major assignments on them, I realized that it was all a bit superficial. Magazines were really into the gang thing. It was an easy story for them to digest and it was a way to make an old story new and relevant. But the bigger picture doesn’t really make a good story. It’s long and murky and loaded with pain. There are no easy outs. Deconstructing hundreds of years of oppression to understand why we now see these statistics just isn’t catchy enough for the mainstream press. But I couldn’t stop just because the magazines couldn’t handle it. I wasn’t sure where it would all lead, but I knew I couldn’t stop.”