Edward
S. Curtis was an American photographer (1868-1952) who became a celebrated
portrait artist in Seattle, Washington after buying a share of a photographic
studio in 1887. Through a chance encounter
one day with George Bird Grinnell (a well-known anthropologist, naturalist and
historian) on Mt. Rainier, Curtis was invited to become the official
photographer on a large scientific expedition, the Harriman Alaska Expedition
of 1899. Grinnell was impressed with
Curtis’s work on this expedition and offered to take him on an excursion to
visit with Native American tribes the following year. This excursion turned out to be the start of
what would become Curtis’s life work, The North American Indian, a twenty
volume photographic and ethnological documentation of every Native American
tribe in North America. During the
course of the thirty years that Curtis worked on this project, he took over
40,000 photographs of Native Americans using glass plate negatives and the
photogravure photo mechanical process.
Curtis
had several purposes in wanting to photograph and document Native American
lives. At the start of the project,
around 1900, the Native Americans and their lifestyle were quickly disappearing
due to white American expansion across the country. Curtis wanted to document Native Americans in
their own environment, free from any white man influence, before they
disappeared along with their customs and rituals. In the introduction to The North American
Indian, Curtis writes, “The passing of every old man or woman means the passing
of some tradition, some knowledge of sacred rights possessed by no other;
consequently the information that is to be gathered, for the benefit of future
generations, respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind,
must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost for all time. It is this need that has inspired the present
task.” (Egan 140-141).
Curtis’s
second purpose was to show the Native Americans as true human beings and not
the character types they were portrayed as in the early 1900s, primitive
savages who were lazy and immoral. He wanted
to break the stereotypes and show the intimacy of their everyday life and community
within the tribes. He wanted to correct
the misinformation that was being presented to the public due to the lack of
understanding and direct study of Native Americans by the scholars who claimed
to be experts in the field, and who contributed heavily to those stereotypes.
Lastly,
even though he started off the project as purely documentary and did not want
to get mixed up in any politics regarding Native Americans at the time, he took
the opportunity as time went by to use his photographs and field studies to advocate
for the Native Americans and harshly criticize their treatment by the
government and white America in general.
He wanted to try and correct the wrongs that had been done to the tribes
that he had come to love.
In
the early years of the project Curtis gained wide spread fame and earned rave
critical reviews for his photographs.
His first two volumes were hailed as a “literary, artistic, historical
masterpiece” (Egan 154). Curtis was seen
as an emerging leader in the relatively new field of photojournalism as well as
a premiere “photo-historian” of his time (Egan 137). All of this praise was not helping him to
achieve his goal of breaking down Native American stereotypes, however. Curtis had to sell these volumes through
subscription only, due to the high cost of producing them, and the $500 price
tag made them accessible to only the very rich or to cultural institutions that
the public rarely got to see. The
overall mass impact that the photographs had seemed to be purely artistic in
nature at best. As time went on, and the
project that was originally supposed to take five years dragged out to thirty
years, Americans lost interest in the Native Americans. In the 1920s, Americans were caught up in the
Jazz Age and when volumes fifteen and sixteen were released in 1924, they were
largely ignored. The stock market crash
of 1929 sealed the fate of the project.
The world had moved on to bigger concerns and the publishing of the last
volume of the series in 1930 was met with complete silence (Egan 298).
I
think the real impact of these photographs and field studies came much later,
seen through the lens of history as a treasure from the past. Although Curtis has been criticized, heavily
at times, for both his photographic methods (altering pictures to show the
Native Americans as he wanted them to be seen) as well as the means by which he
was able to photograph the tribes (bribing Native Americans to often do things
that were deemed illegal by the government), as a whole the benefits of what he
produced has far outweighed the negative.
Curtis’s study has amounted to one of the largest anthropological
projects ever undertaken in the United States and has produced the largest
archive of Native American photographs and documentation in both written word
and audio. This treasure trove has
proven to have a significant impact in several ways.
Most
significantly, descendants of those Native Americans tribes have been able to
use the photographs and field studies to bring back the old traditions and
languages that became nearly extinct as the tribes were decimated throughout
the early 20th century.
Today’s Native Americans use the photographs to see the traditional
dress and costumes, and how the sacred ceremonies were performed, and can use
that to build upon their teachings to the next generation so that these customs
are not lost forever (Egan 320). Curtis provided
visual proof of how things used to be; things that may have otherwise been lost
if they were only passed down orally through subsequent generations that died
out. And not only did he provide visual
documentation, but he provided it through the viewpoint of the Native American
themselves. Curtis always tried to
capture images from the Native American’s point of view and not what the white
man saw. He captured their humanity and
their dignity and their relationship to the world around them at that
time. This provides a sense of pride and
cultural identity to Native Americans today that can rise above the negative
stereotypes and viewpoints that were so prevalent in the 20th
century and beyond.
Curtis’s
works are also a vast resource for many contemporary artists and writers today
who use his photographs as source materials as they delve into Native American
history. Many of them “find the impetus
for new art works in historical photographs by Edward Curtis. These historical
images are revitalized by their representation as contemporary art works,
whether incorporated into larger compositions or emulated in their effect.” (Vervoort
479). And for those Native artists who
criticize Curtis’s work because of the doctoring of images mentioned earlier,
they are reclaiming the images that Curtis took and using them as a starting
point to re-imagine Native photography (K.).
Curtis providing the original image, whether manipulated or not, gives
them with a starting point that they would not have had otherwise.
Lastly,
Curtis’s photographs provide a unique documentation of American history. They are validations of an important and unparalleled
moment in the evolution of American identity.
They are contrary to many of the histories taught in schools; they tell our
country’s history through the eyes of those that were left outside of the
building of our nation. It is a
viewpoint that is essential to remember in the scope of what it means to be
American.
Works Cited
Egan, Timothy. Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The
Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. Boston: Houghton
Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. Print.
K., Adrienne. "Smiling Indians and Edward S.
Curtis." Native Appropriations.
N.p., 22 Feb. 2011. Web. 03 Apr. 2014. <http://nativeappropriations.com/2011/02/smiling-indians-and-edward-s-curtis.html>.
Vervoort, Patricia. "Edward S. Curtis's
'Representations': Then And Now." American Review Of Canadian Studies
3 (2004): 463. Academic OneFile. Web. 3 Apr. 2014.
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