Timothy Egan‘s new book, “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), recalls the photographer who documented Native American life. Mr. Egan is a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer for The New York Times whose column appears in the Opinionator blog. He has also won the National Book Award for “The Worst Hard Time” (also published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, in 2005). We asked Mr. Egan to write about Curtis for Lens. I’m a third-generation Westerner, so the photographs of Edward S. Curtis have been as much a part of my landscape as a desert mesa or a mountain glacier. I took him for granted: those faces of Native Americans, those everyday tasks, those searing looks from the inside of tepees lit by late daylight. In his pictures, ordinary people look extraordinary. He captured the humanity of the continent’s first inhabitants. But it was only when I started looking at his life story for my book “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher” — his slog by horse and hoof, train and auto to the attics and aeries of America, where Native Americans had been pushed to the margins — that I started to appreciate the scope of his masterpiece. Curtis was a celebrity, the Annie Leibovitz of his day. He gave up a life as a prominent portrait photographer to start his Indian epic, and spent more than 30 years producing the 20 volumes of “The North American Indian.” It was called “the most gigantic undertaking since the making of the King James edition of the Bible” by The New York Herald. But it was also one of the largest anthropological enterprises ever undertaken by a single man. When he started in 1896, Indians were at their low ebb, with a total population that had dwindled to less than 250,000. Many scholars thought they would disappear within a generation’s time. Curtis set out to document lifestyle, creation myths and language. He recorded more than 10,000 songs on a primitive wax cylinder, and wrote down vocabularies and pronunciation guides for 75 languages. Along the way, he never denied asking people to pose. He paid them for it. He asked his subjects to dress in the clothes of their fathers and mothers. To me, this is no different than, say, going to Scotland to photograph different family clans, and then asking someone if they would pose in the kilts of their grandparents. Curtis was looking for the authenticity that the early 20th century was crushing. He urged Indians, many of them his friends, to show him the dances and ceremonies that the government was then trying to outlaw. In essence, he was an accomplice to a crime – urging people who were not yet citizens to show him the old ways. I tried to visit every reservation that Curtis visited. And one of the things I found was how much the tribes – today – appreciate Curtis. His pictures are prominently displayed. And his recordings have been instrumental in the linguistic revival of many tribes. The great task broke Curtis. He died alone, a pauper, in a tiny apartment. He lost the copyright of his work to J.P. Morgan, and ultimately to the public domain. Today, there are fewer than 300 of the completed, intact, 20-volume sets in existence. History, as with many great artists, has been kind to him: A few days ago, a single set sold for $1.44 million in an auction at Swann Galleries — fetching more than any other single lot there in 70 years. But Curtis achieved what he set out to do, for he always said his goal was to make American Indians live forever. On October 19th, 1952, Curtis died of a heart attack. He was eighty-four. It was a national curse, it seemed once again, to take as a life task the challenge of trying to capture in illustrated form a significant part of the American story. The Indian painter George Catlin had died broke and forgotten. Mathew Brady, the Civil War photographer who gave up his prosperous portrait business to become a pioneer of photojournalism, spent his last days in a dingy rooming house, alone and penniless. Curtis took his final breath in a home not much larger than the tent he used to set up on the floor of Canyon de Chelly … …Collectors were always asking if there was anything still to surface from the Curtis estate. No, Beth insisted, her father had left this world as he’d entered it, without a single possession to his name. That is, with one exception, unknown to outsiders, perhaps even to the House of Morgan, and certainly to the creditors who had chased him from one century to the next. Curtis had held onto a single set of The North American Indian, the twenty volumes taking up five feet of shelf space in the tiny apartment on Burton Way. Though he was alone at death, and friendless, not a single face in those books was a stranger to him.
Posted on: Thu, 06 Jun 2013 13:14:24 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015