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Brenda Anderson

In Homage To...

Edward Curtis

Edward Curtis (1868-1952) was a complicated, passionate, self-educated pioneer and visionary artist who rose from poverty and obscurity to become the most famous photographer of his time. Between 1900 and 1930 he traveled from Mexico to the Arctic, from the Rockies to the Pacific, photographing and recording more than eighty different tribes. He became friends with Teddy Roosevelt, got funding from J. P. Morgan, and set out in 1900 to photograph traditional Indian ways that he thought were vanishing. Curtis abandoned his career as a successful portrait photographer, and sacrificed his health, his marriage, and all of his assets to create an astonishing body of work: 10,000 recordings, 40,000 photographs, twenty volumes of text, a full-length motion picture with Kwakiutl people in 1914, and several books of Indian stories.

Why did Curtis set this impossible goal, and what drove him to keep going for thirty years? He believed that this was the moment when traditional Indian life could still be captured for posterity. He felt a sense of urgency to complete his work before it was too late. He wrote that every time an elder dies, irreplaceable knowledge is lost. He was determined to go out and find those elders, to talk to them and record information about their cultures before it was too late. His sincere interest won the trust of many important people on reservations at a time when they had little reason to trust any white man.

Source : Edward Curtis on Wikipedia