Comanche Dance, Tesuque Pueblo 1938

Chester Leich made this print, Comanche Dance, Tesuque Pueblo, using a metal plate, sometime around 1920. The image is built up with tiny etched marks, thousands of little lines creating areas of tone and shadow. It’s kind of amazing how just varying the density of marks can give such a sense of form. Looking closely, I can see the marks are denser around the figure’s face and headdress, bringing them forward, while the second figure is more subtly rendered. The etched line has a cool quality. It reminds me of drawings by Alfred Rethel, but there’s also something about the subject matter that echoes early photography, particularly the work of Edward Curtis. That tension between the hand-made and the photographic gives the print an enigmatic, timeless quality; Leich takes an image from a specific moment in time and transforms it into something universal. It reminds us that art is always in conversation with what came before, borrowing and transforming ideas across generations.