Educating a broader public of Edward S. Curtis

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The need to generate publicity in order to sell subscriptions led to the circulation of Curtis’s photographs and writings much more widely than The North American Indian itself. Between 1906 and 1909, for example, Curtis produced for the popular Scribner’s Magazine a series of photographically illustrated essays devoted to what he called “Vanishing Indian Types,” such as the traditionally nomadic Apaches of the Southwest, the sedentary Pueblo peoples of the same region, and the horse cultures of the northern Plains. Like Curtis’s popular “reader,” Indian Days of the Long Ago, published in 1914, those articles offered much ethnographic data, and, just as important, they stressed the “strange” aspects of the cultures they treated, such as the Apaches’ reluctance to speak of their religious beliefs. In common with travel writing of the period, Curtis’s writings detailed his own experiences among exotic peoples in wondrous landscapes.

Curtis engaged in a different genre of writing altogether when he produced the scripts for his Indian “musicale” or “picture-opera” in 1911–12. He was an admirer of Mary Austin, whose “Indianesque” verse play The Arrowmaker was produced on Broadway in 1911, but he was also indebted to other more explicitly “entertaining” presentations of Indians, such as Buffalo Bill Cody’s Wild West show. The musicale was an elaborate lantern-slide show narrated by Curtis himself to the accompaniment of orchestral music composed by Henry F.B. Gilbert that, in turn, had been derived from Native American music recorded on wax cylinders in the field by the Curtis team. The emphasis was again partly on the communication of ethnographic information, partly on the romantic beauty and exoticism of indigenous lifeways, and partly on Curtis’s own, perhaps exaggerated, adventures in the West. Curtis was figured as someone who lived among “primitive” peoples, the “photo-historian of the North American Indian.” Although the musicale was lauded as a spectacle—it even had a huge tepee onstage, lit from within, plus a full orchestra—and was performed to enthusiastic audiences the length of the east coast, including Carnegie Hall, it was not a financial success, and plans for a full second season were abandoned.

Curtis nevertheless built on the show business aspect of the musicale in his next major venture, In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), a full-length feature movie. Like Robert Flaherty’s more-famous Nanook of the North (1922), which it partly inspired, Curtis’s film, centred on the Kwakiutl (Kwakwaka’wakw) people of British Columbia, transmitted documentary material—such as ceremonies, hunting customs, and even religious beliefs—via a linear fictitious narrative, a love story, set in a time before contact with whites. The film was spectacular, especially when projected with its original orchestral score, and garnered good reviews, but it also failed to make money.

Subscribers—fewer than 250 in number—had long waits between successive volumes of The North American Indian, which was completed in 1930 only with great difficulty. During the 1920s, his marriage broken down and his portrait studio now run from Los Angeles by his eldest daughter, Curtis was forced by financial pressures to cede rights to his own pictures, to sell off footage of his feature film, and to take time out to work as a stills cameraman in Hollywood. After the project ended, his energies erratic, he tried gold mining, worked at his memoirs, and for a while farmed a California smallholding. By the time of his death, in 1952, few obituarists recalled his earlier fame.

Curtis’s reputation

The initial years of Curtis’s national prominence in the first decade of the 20th century saw his photography lauded by the photographic press. It was appreciated—even exhibited—by Alfred Stieglitz, the force behind the Pictorialist Photo-Secession movement in the United States. In keeping with the tenets of Pictorialism, Curtis’s images were frequently composed as if their Indian subjects were above and beyond the machinations of actual history. But fashions in photography changed and, while in fact many of Curtis’s later images for the project had the directness of “straight” photography—the sharply focused, seemingly unmanipulated photography as practiced by such Modernist near-contemporaries as Edward Weston—all of it was increasingly perceived as staged and old-fashioned. In Curtis’s heyday, critics and the public tended to accept his evaluation of the importance of The North American Indian, but when his personal appearances in the press stopped, it too was largely forgotten. From the mid-1920s to the early 1970s, Curtis’s work went through a long period of neglect, with the exception of approving notices from certain anthropologists who appreciated the extent and detail of the project’s data.

The revival of interest in Curtis during the 1970s came from two fronts that sometimes overlapped: collectors and dealers in vintage photographs and proponents of the counterculture with New Age and somewhat romanticized notions of “traditional” indigenous cultures. The critic A.D. Coleman, then a reviewer for The New York Times, praised the photographs and, with T.C. McLuhan, published a large selection of them in Portraits from North American Indian Life (1972), which gained a wide readership. Then in 1973 The North American Indian was reprinted in a new, smaller format. Other anthologies, as well as exhibitions, followed. Commentary on Curtis either uncritically lauded the beauty of his images and the veracity of The North American Indian’s accounts or, in opposition, debunked his efforts as if he were no more than a charlatan. Since the mid-1990s, however, there has been a steady accumulation of scholarship offering a more-circumspect but fuller understanding of both the project as a whole and the photographs in particular.