Jeffrey Thomas

Photographer Jeffrey Thomas is Native American Iroquois by descent. In his work, he devotes himself to photographing his own people. SHOOTING INDIANS is both a portrait of Thomas and an examination of the way North American Indians have been portrayed over the years.

Living human skin is the latest designer fabric, mobile phones call the dead and genetics corporations manufacture headless livestock for the butcher in the latest dispatch from Thomas's Punktown, a vividly realized, ultra-bleak off-world cityscape, in which bloody terror and sci-fi spectacle meld to ferocious effect. The central plot—from which there are a number of strange digressions—concerns Jeremy Stake, an interdimensional war veteran and private eye who's constantly aggravated by his involuntary, Zelig-like ability to mimic those around him. His latest assignment is to track down a missing one-of-a-kind bio-doll manufactured specially for a genetics tycoon's daughter—a toy that isn't quite as defenseless as its teenage owner presumes. When describing the intricacies of Punktown's macabre culture, Thomas's prose sizzles, but the setup proves largely superfluous to the narrative, propelled by splatter-happy action and firefight climaxes, along with occasionally stilted exposition regarding extradimensional deities.