AT A GLANCE
- Known for
- The North American Indian (1907–1930), 20 volumes of text and photogravures about Native peoples of North America
- Worked in
- Black and white, on glass plates, printed mostly as sepia photogravures
- Camera
- Large glass-plate view cameras, up to 14x17 inches
- Also
- Made the film In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914) and more than 10,000 wax cylinder sound recordings
- Start with
- The North American Indian: The Complete Portfolios (Taschen, 1997)
- Links
Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952) was an American photographer from Seattle. For more than twenty years he photographed Native peoples across the American West. The result was The North American Indian, a set of 20 volumes and 20 portfolios published between 1907 and 1930.
The story
In 1898, a group of scientists came to study Mount Rainier. Edward Curtis, a young Seattle photographer, was already on the mountain. It was his second season there, making pictures. He later called them tenderfoots. “A couple of times they got lost, I managed to get them to my camp when I thawed them out and bedded down,” he remembered in a letter more than fifty years later. Among the men were George Bird Grinnell and C. Hart Merriam.
Curtis had grown up far from mountains. He was born in 1868 near Whitewater, Wisconsin. As a boy he built his first camera from boxes and a stereopticon lens his father had brought back from the Civil War. Later the family moved to Puget Sound, and in Seattle he ran a studio and photographed the city’s leading families. His first picture of a Native person was a portrait of Princess Angeline, the daughter of Chief Seattle. He paid her a dollar for each picture.
The lost scientists did not forget their guide. They helped persuade the railroad man Edward Harriman to pay for an expedition to Alaska. They also suggested Curtis as its official photographer. In 1899 he sailed north as the youngest member of the party. In the summer of 1900, Grinnell took him to Montana to see the Piegan Sun Dance. “Take a good look,” Grinnell told him. “We’re not going to see this kind of thing much longer.” From that year comes his portrait Weasel Tail - Piegan.
After that, a studio in Seattle was not enough. Curtis planned a photographic history of the Native peoples of North America. Grinnell told him to learn from the people themselves, not from secondhand reports. In 1906 J. P. Morgan agreed to give $75,000, paid over five years. The first volume appeared in 1907.
The work went on until the twentieth volume in 1930. By then he had visited more than 80 tribes and made more than 40,000 photographs. He took no salary for it. The young man who once led lost travelers back to camp had found his own road, and he never left it. In his memoirs, written at 83, he gave himself a name. “Following the Indian’s form of naming a man, I would be termed The Man Who Never Took Time To Play.”
The work
- 1868Born near Whitewater, Wisconsin
- 1898Rescues lost scientists, among them George Bird Grinnell, on Mount Rainier
- 1899Official photographer of the Harriman Alaska Expedition
- 1900Sees the Piegan Sun Dance in Montana with Grinnell
- 1906J. P. Morgan agrees to fund the project with $75,000
- 1907First volume of The North American Indian is published
- 1914His film In the Land of the Head Hunters premieres
- 1930The twentieth and last volume is published
- 1952Dies in Los Angeles on 19 October
Lessons
Say yes to chance. A meeting with lost scientists on Mount Rainier led to Alaska, then to Montana, then to his life’s work.
Learn from the people you photograph. Grinnell told him to gather his information from the people themselves. Curtis also recorded their songs and stories, not only their faces.
Think in series. Each plate was part of a larger record. Twenty volumes and twenty portfolios grew from one plan.
Try this: choose one community near you and visit it for a year. Write down the name of every person you photograph and one thing they tell you. At the end, put the pictures and the words together.
Gear
Large view camera: in the field he carried a 14x17 inch view camera that used glass plates.
Premo view camera: a smaller dry-plate view camera, a Reversible Black Premo, with a shutter speed of 1/25 of a second.
Reflex camera: a 6x8 inch reflex model that used sheet film.
He worked without an exposure meter and without filters. Most of his pictures reached readers as photogravures: the image was etched onto a copper plate and printed in sepia ink on fine paper. He also carried a wax cylinder recorder and made more than 10,000 sound recordings.
Books
The North American Indian: The Complete Portfolios (Taschen, 1997). A thick, compact book of 768 pages that reproduces all 721 large photogravures from the twenty rare portfolios, plus a selection of the smaller pictures from the text volumes. The introduction is by Hans Christian Adam, and the book also carries Theodore Roosevelt’s original foreword. The original sets were made in a tiny edition and are almost impossible to see outside big libraries. This book lets anyone page through the whole project at home, in the order Curtis planned it. The best place to start.
Edward S. Curtis: One Hundred Masterworks (Prestel, 2015). Selected by Christopher Cardozo, a leading Curtis expert, from a private archive of rare vintage prints. The 184 pages hold both famous and rarely seen pictures, across every subject, region and print process Curtis used. Essays by Louise Erdrich, A. D. Coleman, Eric J. Jolly and Michael Charles Tobias add context, including the role Native people played in making the work. A good choice for readers who care about the prints as objects.
Sacred Legacy: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian (Simon & Schuster, 2000). A large book of 192 pages, edited by Christopher Cardozo. The foreword is by the Kiowa writer N. Scott Momaday, with essays by Cardozo and Joseph D. Horse Capture and an afterword by the filmmaker Anne Makepeace. Its big pages suit the pictures well. Good for readers who want Native voices next to the photographs.
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). A biography by the journalist Timothy Egan, subtitled The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. Over 370 pages it follows Curtis through the three decades of The North American Indian. It won the 2013 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Read it for the life behind the pictures.
In his words
“The first photograph I ever made of an Indian was of Princess Angeline, the digger and dealer in clams.”
“I paid the princess a dollar for each picture I made.”
Explore how Edward S. Curtis's ambitious project to document the lives and cultures of Native American tribes changed the way we understand an entire culture, and learn about the power of photography to capture the soul of a culture.