PHO150 Digital Photography: Edward Curtis

With more than 150 photographs, Edward S. Curtis Above the Medicine Line is both a compelling narrative that sheds new light on the Curtis mystique and a fascinating overview of many of the First Peoples he studied a century ago.

For three decades from the 1890s onwards, Edward S. Curtis took thousands of photographs of Native Americans all over the West. These were published (1907-1930) in twenty volumes of illustrated text and twenty portfolios of photographs; the project was supported by Theodore Roosevelt and funded in part by J. Pierpont Morgan, and spawned exhibitions, postcards, magazine articles, lecture series, a 'musicale', and the very first narrative documentary film. While not necessarily unique, the project was bigger, better funded, and more famous than any of its time, and its images still retain their influence today. Neither a eulogy to Curtis's achievement nor a debunking of it, this book is an honest study of the project as a collective whole: what it was, who was involved, and what it meant.

In Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian Project in the Field, Mick Gidley provides an intimate and informative glimpse of Edward S. Curtis and his associates as they undertook their work in the early decades of the twentieth century. Gidley draws on a wide array of unpublished or uncollected reminiscences, reports, letters, field notes, and magazine and newspaper articles. This book also sheds light on the views of Curtis and his contemporaries concerning their enterprise and the Native peoples they worked with and provides a clearer sense of how both Native Americans and the mainstream American public perceived their efforts.

Edward S. Curtis Chronicles Native Nations considers the work of Edward S. Curtis as he photographed the people and cultural practices of a large number of Native nations. Using many stunning, full-page photos, it examines Curtis's role in the preservation of Native cultures, including criticism of his work and methods.

First published in 1976, this book is the classic photographic record of Native American life by one of America's greatest photographers. From 1904 to 1930 Edward Sheriff Curtis sought out the vanishing tribes of Native Americans with an unwavering passion and dedication. His life's work was to record the faces and lifestyles of the Indians before they vanished forever. He photographed more than eighty tribes, from the Southwest to the Arctic. It was an achievement both poignant and monumental. For this book, Curtis's daughter, Florence, has selected 175 of her father's greatest photographs. She has also collaborated closely with Victor Boesen to give readers a moving and detailed biography of Curtis's life and work. In addition, there is a memoir of Curtis by his son, Harold.

Featuring nearly 200 rarely seen photographs from Edward S. Curtis' masterpiece, The North American Indian, The Image Taker combines the little known histories and stories from 26 Indian tribes, transporting the reader to a lost age.

Edward Sherriff Curtis spent more than forty years photographing and documenting the Native peoples of North America, taking more than 40,000 photographs and amassing a staggering archive of documentary material about North American tribes and social groups. While many books have explored the artistic value of the images he created, The Many Faces of Edward Sherriff Curtis assesses his contributions to the field of anthropology. The Many Faces of Edward Sherriff Curtis is a book for our time. Its clear assessment of the past, its striving to bring forth images and words too long out of the public eye, and its message of endurance bespeak the future of Native peoples worldwide.

This book gathers Curtis's entire American Indian portfolio into one publication, offering renewed access to and appreciation of his extraordinary achievement, which is as much a precious historical document as a triumph of the photographic form.

The North American Indians: a selection of photographs by Edward S. Curtis is an exhibition presented by the Philadelphia Museum of Art from September 7 through October 15, 1972. It is published as a catalogue for the exhibition, as Aperture, Volume 16, number 4, and as a book for general distribution.

Featuring 250 photographs by over 150 different artists, this book surveys fine art photography in American throughout the 20th century.