Shane Brown: In the Territories and Reservation Dogs

Shane Brown is an Oklahoma-based, Cherokee photographer and filmmaker documenting the present-day cultural landscape of the American West, experimenting with representations of time and motion, and working on a variety of film projects. Brown’s documentary photography project “In the Territories,” is a photographic survey of the cultural landscape of the American state of Oklahoma, its convoluted histories and their present-day manifestations. Other photography projects include “Life Out There,” an exploration of the Atomic Age-based mythology of the American West; and, “Great Plains Schema,” a survey of the ethos, archetypes, and myths of the Great Plains region. Brown’s projects reveal that the American West, Oklahoma, and the Great Plains region—in spite of or, perhaps because of, their mythos—have not escaped the 21st century any more than they did the 19th, 16th, or 5th centuries.

 Over the last two decades, Brown has pursued freelance and creative projects in documentary and experimental photography and cinematography. Presently, Shane is the on-set still photographer for the Peabody Award winning FX series, Reservation Dogs, created by Taika Waititi and Sterlin Harjo. The series depicts contemporary reservation life through the lives of four teenagers. Other photography and cinematography clients and projects include—The New York Times, Bloomberg Businessweek, Tiger King 2, Teton Trade Cloth, First Americans Museum, Smithsonian Magazine, American Indian Quarterly, Bob Dylan Archive, Woody Guthrie Archive, Yeti, Buffalo Nickel Creative Agency, and Love and Fury (2020), Mekko (2015), and This May Be the Last Time (2014), all feature-length films by director Sterlin Harjo. In 2022, Shane was part of a team of Wall Street Journal editors, journalists, and photographers nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Explanatory Journalism.