Edward Sheriff Curtis
A beautiful monograph featuring Curtis's nineteenth-century portraits of Native Americans.
Joanna Cohan Scherer
- Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868–1952) is one of the earliest successful portrait photographers, well-known for his remarkable archive of prints documenting the Native American people and their way of life in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century
- This book is the best available introductory monograph to Curtis’s work featuring a series of 55 chronologically organised images from the range of Curtis’s body of work including his iconic and mesmerising images of Native American chiefs, pictures of men hunting and women at work on traditional crafts, beautiful American West landscapes, and classic examples of the studio portraits that were more typical of the Pictorialist photography of the period
- One of the first visual anthropologists Curtis intended to photograph the Native American communities to document a ‘vanishing race’ but his real success lay in creating a powerful record of faces, time and place that transcend their original intention and still have significance as a body of work
- His documentation of the Native American tribes was supported by President Theodore Roosevelt and financier J.P. Morgan and was published in several volumes as The North American Indian – a highly collectible body of work which remains of interest to anthropologists, historians and photographic enthusiasts and students today
- The introductory essay is written by an expert on Curtis who provides a new perspective on his role in shaping the image of Native Americans in the twentieth century, as well as assessing his photographs in incisive picture-by-picture commentary
Hardback
250 x 290 mm, 9 7/8 x 11 3/8 in
128 pp
56 black and white illustrations
ISBN 9780714841762
0714841765
Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868–1952) is best known for his outstanding documentary record of the North American Indian tribes in the first decades of the twentieth century. His portrayal of their ceremonies and daily work, his mesmerising close-up portraits, and his powerful landscapes of the American West were intended to serve as an anthropological resource for a 'vanishing race'. This project was published in The North American Indian, a series of luxurious volumes funded by financier J.P. Morgan and President Theodore Roosevelt. These remain among the most collectible and sought-after photobooks in the history of the medium. The American Indian cultures have not disappeared as Curtis feared, but have instead flourished, and Curtis's project's success now lies in its powerful record of faces, time and place and photographs marked by their dramatic lighting, sensitivity and beauty that still have significance today. Curtis photographed over 80 tribes and this introductory monograph includes a range of his portraits, landscapes and pictures from around the American West, alongside examples of his studio portraiture which was more typical of the Pictorialist photography of the time. A key figure in the history of early-twentieth century photography and anthropology this is the perfect book for students and enthusiasts of photography, history, anthropology and Native American culture.
Joanna Cohan Scherer is Emerita Anthropologist in the Department of Anthropology, Smithsonian Institution. She is an authoirty on photographs of Native Americans and has written numerous books on the subject. She contributes regularly to both photography and anthropology publications and was a key researcher for the Handbook of North American Indian, a twenty-volume encyclopedia on the history and the cultures of all indigenous peoples of North America.