Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated

A study of the literary influence of Edward Curtis's multi-volume collections of Native American photographs.

Mick Gidley (Author)

9780521775731, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 13 February 2000

344 pages, 22 b/w illus.
22.9 x 15.2 x 2 cm, 0.51 kg

' … it is Gidley's achievement to have painstaking reconstructed the various contexts and influences that formed Curtis's enterprise as a complex whole. He has unearthed a treasure-trove of unpublished and previously unregarded material.' Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik

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.

Part I. Introductory: 1. A national undertaking
Part II. Co-ordinates for a Project: 2. Cracker Jack pictures
3. Trading with the Indians
4. Hustling the eminent
5. Diffident ethnology
Part III. Indians Incorporated: 6. Adventure in the field
7. 'The vanishing race' in sight and sound
8. Bronze in action
9. Representing the Indian.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: general [DSB]