Edward S. Curtis Photographs, 1900-1926

Edward Sheriff Curtis was a notable photographer and ethnographer best known for his work The North American Indian a set of 20-volume photographic project that documents the Native-American tribes and their culture in North America. This monumental work was published over a span of 23 years between 1907 and 1930. Curtis was inspired to capture the native Indian people and their culture lest it would be infringed upon and disappear due to the white expansion and white culture. Curtis dedicated thirty years of his life traveling, exploring, documenting and living with the native tribes, which later ensued into one of his most celebrated work, ‘The North American Indian.

A self-taught photographer, Curtis was born in 1868 in Whitewater, Wisconsin. His interest in photography was evident from his early years as he assembled his own camera when he was only twelve years old with the help of the then popular manual Wilson’s Photographics. Curtis and his family moved to Puget Sound, Washington in 1887 and he later opened a portrait studio in 1892 in partnership with Thomas Guptill in Seattle. He renamed the photo studio to ‘Edward S. Curtis, Photographer and Photoengraver’ after he and partner Guptill parted ways in 1897. It was in Washington where Curtis first began photographing the local Native Americans. His images of Puget Sound Native Americans won him the grand prize at the National Photographic Convention of 1898.

In 1898, Curtis came across a group of scientists who were lost while he was photographing the Mt. Rainier. Anthropologist George Bird Grinnell, a noted expert in Native American cultures, was one of the scientists in the group. This happenstance meeting allowed Grinnell to learn about Curtis’ work. Grinnell invited Curtis to be the photographer for the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899 that was spearheaded by Edward H. Harriman and comprised of naturalist John Muir, and zoologist C. Hart Merriam in the team. Grinnell again appointed Curtis the following year to photograph Blackfeet Indian tribe in Montana. These experiences proved crucial for Curtis in perusing and bolstering his interest in studying and documenting the native tribes of North America.

Upon his return to Seattle, Curtis organized exhibitions featuring his work, published articles and gave lectures on native Indian tribes. His work garnered attention from many including the then President Theodore Roosevelt who asked Curtis to photograph family portraits. In 1906, Curtis reached out to John Pierpont Morgan, the railroad tycoon to finance his work, which set his project ‘The North American Indian’ in motion. It was decided that the project would be a set of 20 volumes of ethnographic text illustrated with photoengraving.  The final two volumes of the series was published in 1930. During his 30 years of extensive fieldwork, Curtis is believed to have taken more than 40,000 photographs, 10,000 cylinder sound recordings of Indian speech and music and taken more than 125 trips across country for the making of the project. He was also known as the ‘Shadow Catcher’, a name he earned from the Native Americans. ‘In the Land of the Head Hunters’, is his another notable work which is a first feature-length film to capture the Native Indian people in North America that premiered in 1914. Curtis’ work celebrated Native American culture and left a valuable legacy that offered a rich insight into indigenous people of North America and their way of living.