Florence Pestrikoff

One of the Remaining Speakers of Alutiiq 

This 2017 wet-collodian tintype of  Florence Pestrikoff by Paul Adams and Jordan Layton  is on display at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC. It remains in the collection of the artists.

In a portrait that emphasizes photography's inherent tension between absence and presence, Florence Pestrikoff gazes directly at the viewer with a curious and wise expression. Pestrikoff is one of the last Native speakers of Alutiiq, an endangered Native American language spoken in the village of Akhiok on the Aleutian Islands in Alaska. 

Photographers Paul Adams and Jordan Layton made this portrait using a 20 x 24-inch view camera as part of a series of the last Native speakers of endangered Native American languages. Made with the nineteenth-century wet-collodion tintype process, the portraits are not only hauntingly beautiful in their soft-focus, velvety appearance but are also durable. Created with the most permanent of all photographic processes, they symbolically preserve the faces of the sitters in images that will outlast the disappearing Native languages. -- NPG

The Vanishing Voices Project