Since 2016, French documentary photographer Zen Lefort has gone on road trips from Arizona to New Mexico, crossed Utah, Colorado, and South Dakota. Living with and documenting the life of Native Americans, he witnessed the largest gathering in Native American history: the Standing Rock protests against a Dakota pipeline project-a demonstration of resistance in both a defense of Indigenous sovereignty and cultural preservation. His series Indian Land is a sensitive and honest engagement with the lives of North America's indigenous peoples today. Members of the Navajo and Lakota tribes relate their story to Lefort, and paint a picture of indigenous life in the reservation, their persisting rituals, and their contemporary culture. Thus, the volume draws a portrait that bears traces of a violent history and tells of political struggles by unequal means.
Born in Corse, ZEN LEFORT (*1993) started working as a photographer's assistant in Paris at the age of 17. Documenting the conflict in Central Africa in 2014 and later the Maïdan revolution and the war in Eastern Ukraine as a press photographer, he has devoted himself to longer term projects since 2016. He spent six years in the United States documenting the lives of Native Americans, and lived several months immersed in Indian reservations.