Edward S Curtis (1868-1952)
Edward S Curtis was born near Whitewater, Wisconsin, but grew to manhood in Seattle; his father had joined the great westward migration in search of a better life. Seattle was a frontier town yet a port; it presented the energetic young Curtis with many opportunities for self-advancement and also evoked in him dreams of travel.
Curtis taught himself to take photographs and by 1892 he was partner in a studio. His favourite subjects were Mount Rainier, city scenes, and local Indians - a people he considered decadent and lost, but his pictures of them began to win prizes in competitions. One weekend, while climbing and photographing, he rescued a party of travellers stranded on Mount Rainier. Amongst them was George Grinnell, an authority on Indians, who befriended Curtis. Through Grinnell, Curtis was appointed Official Photographer to the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899. His friendship with Grinnell deepened and he agreed to accompany the older man on his annual visit to the Piegan Sun Dance ceremonies the following year.
During these rituals Curtis appears to have experienced a sense of mystical communion with the Indians and out of this visit came his conception of a comprehensive photographic and written record of all the Indian people west of the Missouri river who still sustained to some large extent their own native traditions. In the light of the present day resurgence of `Red Consciousness' perhaps Curtis was too pessimistic in his belief that the Indians had no definable future as Indians; however, he was certainly correct in his judgement that he was living at a time which was the last possible one for many images of Indian life to be captured (the most obvious being, perhaps, his photographs of the ceremonies attendant on the death of Chief Joseph). Although happily married with a growing family, he embarked on a task that lasted thirty years, and to which he frequently devoted seventeen hours a day. He gathered a small team of assistants and set out to produce The North American Indian, a monumental work of twenty volumes of text and twenty portfolios containing more than 700 photographs.
Despite extremely popular lantern slide lecture tours and financially profitable articles for Scribner's, by 1905 Curtis had run out of funds. But his pictures had attracted attention. President Roosevelt employed him to take his daughter's wedding pictures and Pierpont Morgan agreed to subsidise the field work and production costs of The North American Indian, to the sum of $75,000. Curtis returned to the field with renewed vigour, taking literally thousands of photographs, writing millions of words, and even, in 1914, making a film called In the Land of the Headhunters.
Curtis was very patient with his subjects, willing to spend weeks with them, returning year after year to acquire the pictures and information he needed. He persuaded people to re-enact ceremonies and events for the camera and allow him to witness sacred occasions. He wanted his art to present nothing less than the very spirit of the Indian peoples; he represents a perfect example of the inextricability of the documentary and the aesthetic impulses.
In his later years, his health broken by the incessant travel and strain, Curtis moved his studio to Los Angeles, took stills for Cecil B de Mille's The Ten Commandments, became interested in mining and dreamed of an expedition to the interior gold mines of South America.
Mick Gidley
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