Edward Curtis and his good works

At the time, a century and more ago, when photographer Edward Curtis did his work photographing Native America, the prevailing view of American Indian people held by their non-Native friends and foes in what's called the United States, was that that they  and their tribal societies and their cultures were doomed.  The poignant painting -- End of the Trail -- depicting a Plains warrior with his head drooping atop his horse and carrying a feathered lance pointed downward  -- was a popular piece back then.  Through genocide and massive land theft, Native America far more often than not was seen as a fast dying anachronism in the years following the Wounded Knee massacre of 1890.  Indians, of course, didn't see it that way at all -- nor did the few very empathetic anthropologists, e.g. Frank Speck of the University of Pennsylvania, and quite astute observers such as former New York social worker "come to Taos", John Collier, who later became FDR's Indian Commissioner and who took many tangible and productive pro Indian policy steps .  Edward Curtis worked hard and productively to "capture" Native life before the Sun Went Down.  In the end, of course, Native people, tribes, and cultures are very much a vital part of the scene -- and widely recognized as such.  (H).


October 26, 2012  NYT
Captured on Film
By DEBORAH SOLOMON
SHORT NIGHTS OF THE SHADOW CATCHER

The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis

By Timothy Egan

Illustrated. 370 pp. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. $28.

Edward Curtis deserves to be remembered as the American artist who racked up the most miles. Traveling by rail, wagon and foot, he undertook a project that struck observers as ambitious and possibly insane. His goal, he said, was to salvage a heritage from oblivion, to document all the tribes in North America that were still intact.The result was his magnum opus, "The North American Indian," a 20-volume text-and-image extravaganza, published between 1907 and 1930, that was praised and then forgotten in short order. Curtis spent his final years holed up in Southern California, living a marginal hand-to-mouth existence and consuming a pound of carrots a day in the hope of warding off blindness. 

Timothy Egan offers a stirring and affectionate portrait of an underknown figure in "Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis." Egan, a Seattle-based author and a writer for The New York Times, asks us to see Curtis as a hero in the mythic Western mode - i.e., outdoorsy, virile, untainted by bourgeois values. Initially a society portraitist with a studio in Seattle, he disliked commercial work and gave up a lucrative career to lug his tripod and glass-plate negatives around as he climbed Mount Rainier or descended a ladder into a Hopi kiva crawling with rattlesnakes. 

Curtis's most memorable photographs are not action shots but formal portraits in which individuals appear in sensuous, sepia-toned close-up. He seemed to place a proto-Avedonian emphasis on showing how intimate a photographer can be with his subject. Yet in Curtis's case, the subjects were not celebrities but Native Americans. Curtis glamorized most everyone he photographed. The tribal chief Joseph of the Nez Percé is portrayed as the face of Native American sorrow, his shell earrings glowing like moons against his dark skin. An impressive number of Curtis's photographs are devoted to women - mothers carrying their babies in papoose packs, old women with deeply lined faces, Sioux daughters with glittering eyes and long braids of hair. Image by image, without any rhetoric, the photographs eloquently make the case for equal rights at a time when Native Americans were still maligned as illiterate, itinerant and unwashed. 

Curtis was a charismatic presence, "all blue eyes and bounce in his step," Egan writes. Although he grew up dirt-poor and left school after the sixth grade, he knew how to hold his own among scholars and art collectors. In 1904, when he was in his 30s, he wangled an invitation from Teddy Roosevelt to photograph the president and his children at their summer retreat outside Oyster Bay, on Long Island. He cozied up to Edith Roosevelt by preparing his special Roquefort salad dressing and sharing the recipe with her,and he naturally found time to talk up his Indian project. Roosevelt thought it was "a bully idea," as Egan writes, and proved to be a handy professional reference in coming years. 

Curtis also insinuated himself into the company of J. Pierpont Morgan, who became his patron if not quite his saint. A partnership between the two men might seem unlikely. Morgan helped build the transcontinental railroad, which required wresting land from Native Americans and eliminating more than a few buffaloes on the way out to the Pacific Ocean. Yet Curtis was able to persuade him to underwrite "The North American Indian," promising that all 20 volumes could be completed in five years, for $75,000. In the end, Curtis missed his deadline by 25 years, and Morgan had died by the time the project was completed, more than $2 million over ­budget. 

Egan is a deft storyteller who relates the trajectory of Curtis's career with careful attention to its triumphs and setbacks. But at times he pushes Curtis's virtue in a way that seems forced. When his wife, Clara Curtis, filed for divorce in 1916, she claimed that he had been absent for most of 10 years. During that period, she contended, he "associated with other women." 

Is there truth to the claim? Who were the other women? Egan does not weigh in, except to remark coyly that "Curtis admitted to having a mistress, an insatiate one - 'The North American Indian.' " Perhaps he thinks the question of Curtis's love life and romantic dalliances is trivial, or perhaps he thinks nothing very sexy happened. But in the absence of any reflection on the charge of philandering, the book at times reads less like a thoughtful biography than a sentimental adventure story for boys. 

Egan also gives short shrift to the questions surrounding Curtis's art. Just a few pages before the end of his book, he mentions that contemporary scholars have accused Curtis of posing his subjects and conspiring to drape the hard realities of Native American life in an aura of silky romance. 

Indeed, Curtis routinely relied on the conventions of studio portraiture - namely, lighting, props and costumes. By his own admission, he asked Indians who posed for him to change out of their workaday duds and into buckskin dresses or jackets that were redolent of the lost past. Further manipulations occurred in the darkroom. A photograph of two Piegan men seated in a tepee became famous after comparisons with an earlier version revealed that Curtis had erased an alarm clock from the scene, as if to delete any reference to the modern world and the advance of time itself. 

Does this make his photographs less authentic, or somehow ersatz? Of course not. Art, by definition, is fabricated, not found. "Art is the lie that tells the truth," Picasso reportedly said, in a statement that serves as a convenient if self-­congratulatory affirmation of the imagination's fact-­mangling ways. 

Yet Egan prefers to emphasize the documentarian in Curtis over the artist. "Many ceremonies, from the Sun Dance of the Piegan to the Snake Dance of the Hopi, were photographed as they were, in real time, with Curtis doing nothing to influence them," he writes. It's as if Egan is judging Curtis by the standards of journalism, lauding him as a guy who knew how to get in and get the story and relate it without bias. 

To be sure, Curtis collected reams of valuable information. He recorded some 10,000 songs and preserved, in written form, languages and ceremonial rituals whose perpetuation had previously depended on the precarious conveyer of human breath. Yet for all of his ethnographic contributions, Curtis is famous today because his images have an independent, poetic life apart from any information they offer. He was, in other words, a gifted artist, one about whom basic questions have yet to be answered or even posed. Did he look at the work of painters or other photographers? Who influenced him? Did he care about elevating photography to an art form at a time when it was still in its infancy and considered vastly inferior to painting? Egan's biography leaves room for future books on Edward Curtis, and one looks forward to hearing a little less about the alpha male and a little more about the aesthete. 

Deborah Solomon, a frequent contributor to the Book Review, is the author of "Utopia Parkway: The Life and Work of Joseph Cornell" and a forthcoming biography of Norman Rockwell.

HUNTER GRAY [HUNTER BEAR/JOHN R SALTER JR] Mi'kmaq /St. Francis 
Abenaki/St. Regis Mohawk 
Protected by Na´shdo´i´ba´i´ 
and Ohkwari' 
Member, National Writers Union AFL-CIO
www.hunterbear.org 
(much social justice material)

Key pieces from our big Jackson Mississippi Movement 
scrapbook.  Three consecutive and full pages beginning with
this Link:  http://hunterbear.org/a_piece_of__the_scrapbook.htm
See my personal reflections on Medgar Evers:
http://hunterbear.org/medgar_w.htm

The Stormy Adoption of an Indian Child [My Father]:
http://hunterbear.org/James%20and%20Salter%20and%20Dad.htm
(Expanded, and with more photos in Fall 2012. Material on our Native
background.)

For the new (11/2011) and expanded/updated
edition of my "Organizer's Book," JACKSON MISSISSIPPI -- 
with a new and substantial introduction by me.  We are now at 
the 50th Anniversary of the massive Jackson Movement of
1962-63:  http://hunterbear.org/jackson.htm