This is an era of excessive subtitles-but not this one: “Epic” and “immortal” are words most fitting for Curtis, whose 20-volume The North American Indian, a project that consumed most of his productive adult life, is a work of astonishing beauty and almost incomprehensible devotion. In the end he fulfilled his promise: He made the Indians live forever.New York Times Pulitzer Prize–winning writer Egan ( The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America, 2009, etc.) returns with the story of the astonishing life of Edward Curtis (1868–1952), whose photographs of American Indians now command impressive prices at auction.
But today rare Curtis photogravures bring high prices at auction, and he is hailed as a visionary. A nation in the grips of the Depression ignored it.
He completed his masterwork in 1930, when he published the last of the twenty volumes. Despite the friends in high places, he was always broke and often disparaged as an upstart in pursuit of an impossible dream. His most powerful backer was Theodore Roosevelt, and his patron was J. In the process, the charming rogue with the grade school education created the most definitive archive of the American Indian. Eventually Curtis took more than 40,000 photographs, preserved 10,000 audio recordings, and is credited with making the first narrative documentary film. And the undertaking changed him profoundly, from detached observer to outraged advocate. It took tremendous perseverance - ten years alone to persuade the Hopi to allow him into their Snake Dance ceremony. And he was thirty-two years old in 1900 when he gave it all up to pursue his Great Idea: to capture on film the continents original inhabitants before the old ways disappeared.Īn Indiana Jones with a camera, Curtis spent the next three decades traveling from the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the Acoma on a high mesa in New Mexico to the Salish in the rugged Northwest rain forest, documenting the stories and rituals of more than eighty tribes. He moved in rarefied circles, a friend to presidents, vaudeville stars, leading thinkers. How a lone mans epic obsession led to one of Americas greatest cultural treasures: Prizewinning writer Timothy Egan tells the riveting, cinematic story behind the most famous photographs in Native American history - and the driven, brilliant man who made them.Įdward Curtis was charismatic, handsome, a passionate mountaineer, and a famous photographer, the Annie Leibovitz of his time.
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