Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952)
Born in 1868, Curtis’s photographic career began in 1891 when he purchased a Seattle photographic studio in partnership with Thomas Guptill. Within five years the pair was winning prestigious awards for their work, including a bronze medal from the Photographer’s Association of America. A year later the partnership dissolved.
Curtis remained in the photography business with a strong studio trade and a sideline of nature photography, especially views of Mt. Rainier. In 1899 he joined the Harriman Alaska Expedition as its official photographer and, in 1900, he joined noted outdoorsman George Bird Grinnell on an expedition to photograph American Indians in Montana.
Curtis continued to win national prizes, one of which produced a commission to photograph Theodore Roosevelt’s children. The Roosevelt connection was an important one as it introduced him to the financier J. Pierpont Morgan who eventually poured $400,000 into Curtis’s monumental project The North American Indian, 1906-1928. His goal with this undertaking was to photograph “all the important tribes in the United States and Alaska that still retain to a considerable degree their primitive customs and traditions.” Ultimately more than eighty different tribes would be represented in the 20 volumes of illustrated text and twenty large unbound photogravure folios that comprised the monumental project. It took 23 years of Curtis’s life to produce and cost him his marriage, his health and his finances…the estimated total cost of $1.5 million devastated his livelihood.
Even though Frederick Webb Hodge of the Bureau of American Ethnology agreed to serve as editor of the text volumes, Curtis is frequently criticized for posing his subjects to create a romanticized image and for not being a trained ethnographer. None-the-less, his photographs documented a historically significant period in America and remain one of the country’s greatest photographic achievements.
About 40,000 photographs were taken during the project, about 2,300 of which were used in the completed volumes and portfolios. Curtis selected The Vanishing Race as the portfolio’s first photograph: “The thought which this picture is meant to convey is that the Indians as a race, already shorn of their tribal strength and stripped of their primitive dress, are passing into the darkness of an unknown future. Feeling that the picture expresses so much of the thought that inspired the entire work, the author has chosen it as the first of the series.” Other well known works from the portfolio include: A Son of the Desert (Volume 1, Plate 32), A Chief of the Desert (Volume 1, Plate 26), Canyon de Chelly (Volume 1, Plate 28), Raven Blanket, Nez Perce (Volume 8, Plate 259), Chief Joseph, Nez Perce (Volume 8, Plate 256) and Geronimo, Apache (Volume 1, Plate 2).
An intended 500 sets were planned for the epic project, however no more than approximately 270 were actually completed. The subscriber has a choice of prints on Holland Van Gelder paper or Japan vellum and Japan tissue. Van Gelder sets sold for the princely sum of $3,000, while the Japanese tissue editions commanded $3,500 (and accounted for only 25 to 30 of the initial sets).
His health broken by more than twenty-five years in the field and suffering from depression Curtis left photography and pursued various other activities, including gold mining. Later he moved to Los Angeles to live with his daughter Beth, where he died in 1952. In 1935 the Morgan Libary sold the 19 remaining complete sets, all plates, prints and copyright to the great project to the Charles Lauriat Co. for $1,000. During World War II the Library destroyed of dispersed all the remaining original glass negatives they had in storage.
Today a complete forty volume set of The North American Indian can bring more than a half million dollars. A number of sets have been broken and both portfolio photogravures (image of 11″ by 15″ on paper 18″ by 22″) and text photogravures (image 8″ by 6.5″ on paper 12″ by 9.5″) periodically come to market. In addition Curtis made and sold his images in various formats including prints and postcards, platinum and silver prints, and goldtones (or orotones, sometimes “Curt-tones”). Goldtones can command high prices from collectors. They were achieved by backing the glass plate positives with gold leaf giving the parts of the image that would normally be white a reflection in gold tones. To Curtis “… all the transluency is retained and they are as full of life and sparkle as an opal.” They were made in sizes from 8″ by 10″ up to 18″ by 22″ and are usually found in custom designed frames.