Photographs by Edward Curtis.(exhibition)(Brief Article)

The early twentieth-century photographer Edward S. Curtis has been rediscovered, first by historians of photography then by ethnologists, and finally by the American public, which learned of him chiefly because of a recent documentary film about his life and work. In 1901, at the age of thirty-three, Curtis set out to photograph every American Indian tribe west of the Mississippi River before their customs, traditions, and culture vanished. His intention was to produce an illustrated series of books about the American Indian.

Curtis is a controversial figure, and scholars argue about the verisimilitude of his photographs and whether or not they compromised their subjects. But even his harshest critics agree that he was first a gifted photographer and later a pioneering filmmaker. His dedication was such that he took great physical risks, lived through enormous financial vicissitudes, sacrificed his marriage, and suffered a nervous breakdown. By 1930, despite all of this, he had taken some forty thousand pictures of approximately eighty American Indian tribes, made more than ten thousand recordings of Indian language and songs, and produced a ...