“The photographs in Silent Warriors are pictures of the twenty-first century of people of the twenty-first century.” (Thomas King, Cherokee) To this day the image of the “Indian” is shaped by the roughly 100-year-old depictions of the photographer Edward Curtis, whose portraits created a romanticising distorted image of North America’s indigenous peoples. Curtis’s pictures served Eric Klemm as a starting point to take an entirely different path. For a year Klemm travelled through the USA and Canada, taking pictures of men, women and children from 81 tribes. The portraits of Native passers-by vibrate with immediacy and are rooted in the present; they were made with a large-format camera on the street, against a white background, without artificial light or theatricality.