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Onondaga photographer Jeff Thomas was in elementary school when he first discovered that he was invisible. Although his family lived in Buffalo, New York, for most of the year-along with a large population of other Iroquois people-he couldn't find any Native people in the official history of America's cities. He might not have known it then, but this realization was the beginning of a life's work.

"A Study of Indian-ness," which opens at Toronto's Gallery 44 on May 6 and continues until June 5, is Thomas' latest photographic exhibition examining the representation of Aboriginal people in urban environments.

The exhibition combines Thomas' own photos with historical photos of First Nations people from sources such as the National Archives of Canada. Thomas' contemporary shots are as carefully posed as the ethnographic photos, but with a subversive view toward interrogating stereotypes and destabilizing the historical record.

According to the photos in the history books Thomas read after he left school in the 1970s, "Indians" wore full regalia and lived on the land. This romanticized, one-dimensional view of Native culture failed to represent Thomas's reality -and the reality of so many Native people-because it failed to show how Aboriginal culture had evolved. The truth was, Native people started moving to cities in the early 20th century.

"I think my work is about how the outside world has defined Native society," the Ottawa-based Thomas said in a telephone interview. "I want to document where our presence is, and communicate that Indian-ness to the world."

Thomas spent summers with his grandmother at Six Nations, and the school year with his family in Buffalo. This parallel existence led to a fascination with juxtaposition and duality.

"Juxtaposition is an important part of my work," Thomas said, "because it's a part of my life. I moved between Six Nations and a lower middle-class Italian neighborhood in Buffalo. I didn't have to find my culture. It was always there. It just had two faces."

That duality is best shown in the photo "Old Chair, Six Nations Reserve," which speaks to a visible presence (the incongruous sight of a chair in a forest) and a poignant absence (the chair is seatless and abandoned). The chair is of the forest (because it's made of wood), but not really from the forest (because it's a European object).

"It's a play on memory, the past, the change to urban existence," Thomas said. "How do you nourish an Iroquois identity in the city? There's no manual or pamphlet to tell you how. That chair symbolizes all the juxtapositions."

Thomas learned from birth how to juggle those juxtapositions and create a life on the reserve and in the city. His father, however, had a harder time. One photo in the exhibition, entitled "My Father's Hands," shows Thomas' father wearing both a Mason ring and wolf clan ring on his right hand.

"It's about alcoholism and the loss of male role models," Thomas explained. "The Mason ring reflects the crowd he hung out with at the bar-it was about fitting into the Buffalo scene. The wolf ring is about following through on what his father did in the longhouse, but it was more about status than anything."

In a series of photos documenting his son Bear at various ages standing in front of historical monuments across the country, Thomas aims to reflect an Indian-ness that the ethnographic photographers would not see as authentic. The photos of Bear, who is now 26 and a hiphop DJ, are a natural counter to the usual stereotypes about urban Aboriginal identity (assimilated, cultureless, homeless, or addicted). As such, they reclaim urban Indian-ness.

"The historical photos take on new meaning when they're mixed up with the contemporary photos. The stuff in the museums, the archives, it's not in our possession. We are captured; a captive culture.

"One of the central things I'm looking at now is the absence of [Native] voice," Thomas said.

T liberate Native people from what Thomas calls the "historical stasis" of ethnographic photos and history books, Gallery 44 is publishing a 64-page book based on the exhibition, called Jeff Thomas: A Study of Indian-ness. The book combines Thomas' photos with short text narratives about his work and the life experiences that have shaped it. It also features an introduction by exhibition co-ordinator Katy McCormick and an essay by curator Richard William Hill (Mohawk).

The book launches on May 19 with a panel discussion entitled "Shooting Indians: Perspectives on Urban Indian-ness," featuring Thomas and artists Bonnie Devine (Ojibway) and Arthur Renwick (Haisla), moderated by Hill.

"Some people think art speaks for itself," Thomas said. "But how do you get people involved in the conversation? What do they think about when they leave? How do we get that [dialogue] going?