Lost In The Wilderness

Kalpesh Lathigra (born 1971) is a British photographer who began his career as a photojournalist, winning a first prize in the World Press Photo competition. He later shifted to personal artistic projects, producing Lost in the Wilderness (2015) and Memoire Temporelle (2022). For Lost in the Wilderness, he photographed life on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation in South Dakota. He explains his choice of subject:"As children, we rarely question the games we play or what we absorb through popular media—films, books, and everyday conversations. For my generation, playing cowboys and Indians was universal, as was watching John Wayne and Gary Cooper fight against Indians, who were always cast as the enemy. In these games, I was always the Indian, never the cowboy—because of my Indian heritage, though from the subcontinent. India was where others saw me belonging. Books like Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee and Ian Frazier's On the Rez became crucial texts as I developed my photographic project at Pine Ridge Reservation.""Lost in the Wilderness explores feeling at home in an unfamiliar place—neither East London, India, nor Africa. Pine Ridge is vast. I didn't set out to create a photojournalistic essay about life there or to study the Lakota Sioux tribe. I'm not Edward Curtis. These photographs capture people, places, moments, and details I connected with, allowing each image to tell its own story. Consider the house on the hill painted with the Stars and Stripes, which I titled 'Fort Robinson.' Near this house stands the actual fort, a site layered with civil rights history—home to the first black cavalry regiment (the Buffalo Soldiers) and the place where the legendary Lakota warrior Crazy Horse was killed."The landscapes, home interiors, a man wearing a bonnet, or a gravestone marked 'Lost Bird' hint at but cannot fully represent the challenges facing the Lakota on Pine Ridge. While poverty, death, and daily hardships are real, there's an undimmed sense of hope...