Great Photographers: Edward Sheriff Curtis

Edward Sheriff Curtis:
One Man's Obsessive Pursuit Of The Lost Tribes Of America
The Telegraph
June 21, 2008

Excerpt:

"During... 30 years (twice the time he had originally planned for the project), Curtis visited more than 80 tribes, from the Apache to the Zuñi, and earned the personal support of the president, Theodore Roosevelt. He worked 15-hour days for months at a time, spent more than $1.5 million of his benefactor JP Morgan's money, was shot at four times, disowned by his brother, divorced by his wife, and went bankrupt. On returning from one prolonged trip into Eskimo territory he was thrown into jail for failure to make alimony payments.

"Yet Curtis was indefatigable: no amount of adversity could sap his passion for documenting the traditions of a people who didn't always want to be documented. 'I have grown so used to having people yell at me to keep out, and then punctuate their remarks with mud, rock and clubs,' he once said, 'that I pay but little attention to them if I can only succeed in getting my picture before something hits me.'

"He succeeded in taking more than 40,000 pictures, the best of which formed the basis of The North American Indian, a vast ethnographic study, published in 20 volumes between 1907 and 1930. On the appearance of the first volume, the New York Herald declared it 'the most gigantic undertaking in the making of books since the King James edition of the Bible'.

Curtis was convinced that he was capturing the dying days of 'a vanishing race'. Indeed, such was his obsession with recording arcane traditions that, to the indignation of the academic community, he would often encourage his subjects to recreate rituals which they no longer performed, even providing his own props where necessary. In his rather self-important introduction to the first volume of The North American Indian, he stated his concern that 'the passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition, some knowledge of sacred rites possessed by no other'."

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Wikipedia On Edward Sheriff Curtis

The Curtis Collection