Edward Curtis1868 - 1954
Born: 1868, White Water, Wisconsin
Died: October 21, 1954, Los Angeles, California
Shortly after his birth in 1868, Edward Curtis and his family moved to Cordova, Minnesota, where they lived close to the Chippewa, Menomini, and Winnebago tribes. While in his teens, Curtis built his own camera and taught himself photography from self-help guides. In 1885, he was apprenticed to a photographer in St. Paul. His father's failing health prompted the family to move to a more temperate climate, however, and they relocated to Port Orchard, Washington, in 1887.
In 1891, Curtis bought a share in his first photographic studio, but the partnership dissolved in less than a year. He then joined with Thomas Guptill in a photography and photogravure business. With his photograph of Princess Angeline (daughter of Chief Seatlh, who the city of Seattle is named after) in 1895, Curtis began his Native American photography, a subject that would occupy him for the rest of his life. His reputation as a photographer spread, and he was hired as an official photographer for the 1899 Harriman expedition to Alaska. The 9,000-mile trip yielded 5,000 pictures and 600 new animal and plant species. After meeting ethnographer George Bird Grinnell on Mount Rainier in 1898, Curtis was invited to Montana to photograph the Blackfeet Indians and record one of the last enactments of the Sun Dance.
After returning from his Montana expedition, Curtis sold his engraving business and acquired the studio of Frank La Roche. In 1901, he began the massive project of recording all the North American Indian tribes. For the next thirty years, he traveled across North America photographing and documenting over eighty tribes west of the Mississippi. Curtis took over 40,000 images and made 10,000 wax cylinder recordings of language and music. He constantly struggled to gain financing for his project in order to issue The North American Indian, a massive twenty-volume limited edition publication that was sold by subscription. The North American Indian consists of ethnological text and 2226 photogravures.
After his wife was awarded both the studio and negatives in a divorce settlement in 1919, Curtis destroyed all of his glass negatives, and in 1920, he moved to Los Angeles with his daughter. In that same year, the famous photographer worked as a cameraman for Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments. He continued to travel, research, and photograph for the twentieth volume of The North American Indian, which was finally published in 1930. At this point, Curtis suffered a mental and physical breakdown. Declining interest in Native American life and the effects of the Depression led to waning interest in his project, and less than 300 sets of his publication sold. He spent the rest of his life with his daughter in California and died of a heart attack in 1954.
In the 1970s, Curtis'work was revived when thousands of individual prints, sheets of unbound paper, and the handmade copper photogravure plates were discovered in a bookstore basement in Boston. Curtis has been criticized for romanticizing the settings of his photographs by adding props or removing traces of European influence. However, his desire to create works of art as well as record "The vanishing race" set him apart from other contemporary photographers, and his work is the most comprehensive compilation of ethnographic information on many North American tribes.