EDWARD CURTIS' LIFE STORY
In the summer of 1900, Edward Curtis witnessed a Sun Dance ceremony that observers at the time believed might be among the last ever performed. The experience opened a door: over the decades that followed, he was welcomed into the sacred lives of thousands of American Indians. The Sun Dance itself was revived in the 1970s and continues today.
"It's such a big dream, I can't see it all." — Edward Curtis
1892–1899 | Curtis was twenty-four when he bought into a Seattle portrait studio. The work paid, but the mountains pulled harder, and he was soon carrying a camera up the peaks and coastlines of Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. By 1895 he had made his first portraits of Native Americans. He photographed the Klondike Gold Rush in 1897, and in 1899 sailed north as official photographer for E. H. Harriman's Alaska expedition — two months among scientists and naturalists that left him with an ambition of his own: to record Native ways of life. The same decade brought him into the Pictorialist movement, whose soft focus and painterly light became his signature.
Edward Curtis
1900–1915 | Curtis gave these fifteen years almost entirely to his study of Native American life, letting the studio portrait business — his livelihood until now — steadily fall away. He began filming Native subjects as early as 1901. In 1911 he took his Picture Opera on tour, pairing his photographs and motion pictures with an original score drawn from Native music and performed by live orchestra. Three years later came In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), the first feature-length narrative film made with an all-Native cast. Throughout, his images appeared in popular magazines and books, among them the British Journal of Photography, the American Museum Journal, and Marah Ellis Ryan's novel The Flute of the Gods.
1916–1930 | Curtis turned to finishing and publishing The North American Indian, supporting the work with jobs in Hollywood — he was on the crew of Cecil B. DeMille's The Ten Commandments, among other pictures. From this period come the blue-toned silver prints known as the "Aphrodite Series" and the "Hollywood Stills." He took few portraits now, working instead behind a motion picture camera. The final volume of The North American Indian appeared in 1930; he produced little of consequence afterward, and died in 1952.
Curtis' Parents
Edward Curtis was born in 1868 on a Wisconsin farm, the second of four children born to the Reverend Johnson Curtis, a Methodist minister, and Ellen Sheriff Curtis. His father had come home from the Civil War penniless and in broken health, and the family lived close to the bone — there were stretches, sometimes days and sometimes weeks, when they ate nothing but potatoes. Before Edward's fifth birthday the family moved again, to rural Cordova, Minnesota, where his father took up the circuit of an itinerant preacher.
Whatever contact the boy had with American Indians in those years went unrecorded. Most traditional Native life in that part of Minnesota had already been displaced by the time the Curtises arrived in the 1870s, and nothing in the record suggests an early encounter that pointed him toward the work of his life.
Reverend Curtis served a parish spread thin across the countryside, and Edward often went with him on the long circuits to reach it, days on foot, and stretches by canoe through the lakes and rivers of southern Minnesota. Somewhere in that travel his love of the outdoors took root.
His schooling ended at twelve. Not long after, he built himself a camera from a stereopticon lens his father had carried home from the war fifteen years earlier and a dollar and a quarter's worth of parts. The self-direction and ingenuity in that act would mark the rest of his life; so, unknowingly, did the camera.
Through his mid-teens he read whatever he could find on photographic technique and tested it himself. At seventeen he moved to St. Paul and took an apprenticeship in a studio there, and by the time he left it he had the fundamentals well in hand, no longer a boy experimenting, but a practitioner in earnest.
In 1887 the Reverend's failing health sent the family west in search of a milder climate, and they settled on the booming Pacific Northwest, the Puget Sound country near Seattle, a choice that would shape the whole of Edward's later work. It cost his father dearly. Weakened further by the journey, Johnson Curtis died within weeks of their arrival, and the burden of supporting the family fell to Edward at nineteen.
Photography had to wait. For several years the Curtises lived hand to mouth, Edward and his younger brother Asahel digging clams along the tideflats and picking fruit and vegetables when the season allowed, taking whatever labor came up in between. By 1890 they had scraped together enough for a modest homestead.
Then Curtis did something bolder. He mortgaged that homestead, the family's one piece of hard-won security, and turned the loan into a share of a small Seattle photography studio. It was a considerable thing to risk, and a fair measure of how much he believed in the work and in his own capacity to make it pay. Two years on, with the studio steady enough to support it, he married a family friend, Clara Phillips. Their four children, Harold, Beth, Florence, and Katherine followed over the years that came.
The truth is that the project was in financial trouble for the whole of its twenty-four years. Between 1906 and 1930 Curtis worked without pause to keep it upright, serving as his own principal fundraiser, holding to a punishing schedule of lectures and exhibitions, selling original prints wherever he traveled, and sinking a great deal of money into a feature film, all against subscription sales that never came near what he had projected. From the start of the First World War until 1921 the strain was worst; through those years the project barely moved at all.
Some of that burden was of his own making. Fieldwork carried its own steady costs, but the expense of publication was extraordinary, and much of it followed from Curtis' own standards. He would accept only the finest materials and craftsmanship. For both the volume illustrations and the portfolio prints he chose photogravure, a difficult and costly process, but one that yielded prints of remarkable subtlety and held their quality consistently across a run. The result was a set so expensive that few could buy it. Of the five hundred sets he projected, an estimated 277 were ever produced, and only two hundred fourteen sold during his years with the project. By most estimates he needed four hundred just to break even.
The North American Indian
The North American Indian was very likely the most ambitious publication ever attempted by one person, and it was recognized as such from the outset — in 1911 the New York Herald called it the most gigantic undertaking since the King James Bible.
Morgan's patronage, generous as it was, proved a double-edged thing. It gave Curtis the means to begin, but it also closed doors. Some potential patrons stayed away out of rivalry or ill feeling toward Morgan; others simply assumed that a man backed by J. P. Morgan could not possibly need their money. The assumption was badly wrong. Morgan's contributions — which in the end far exceeded what he had first pledged — still covered only about thirty-five percent of the project's cost, and Curtis spent the rest of his working life raising the remainder. The financial panic of 1907 made it harder still, cutting into subscription sales just as the project was gathering the momentum it most needed.
Edward Curtis with Theodore Roosevelt's children at their Sagamore Hill home on the east coast.
By 1896 Curtis was the foremost studio photographer in Seattle, and the success bought him something he valued more than money: time away from the studio. He spent it in the mountains and along the coast, and on those trips he began meeting small communities of American Indians still holding to parts of their traditional life. The interest that would become the most comprehensive photographic and ethnographic record of Native North America ever made had taken hold, quietly, by then.
Recognition followed quickly. By 1898 his Indian photographs were drawing notice from the photographic world and the public alike and that same year an accident of timing redirected his life. High on Mount Rainier, Curtis came upon a party of climbers who had lost their way in the fog and led them down. Among them were men of national standing in conservation, ethnography, and publishing, and several took an interest in his work. One was George Bird Grinnell.
The connection brought an invitation. In 1899 Curtis sailed as official photographer on the expedition organized by the railroad magnate E. H. Harriman, nearly three months and thousands of miles between Seattle and the Arctic Circle, in the company of many of the country's most distinguished scientists, ethnographers, and naturalists. It was Curtis' first real immersion in scientific method and its discipline, and it changed how he understood the work he was doing.
By the turn of the century the studio was thriving, his Indian photographs were winning national awards and being shown abroad, and he had both income and reputation to build on. The stage was set when Grinnell invited him along in the summer of 1900 to witness the Sun Dance in Montana. Grinnell had spent twenty seasons in the field with the Blackfoot and Piegan and held a position of trust that opened doors no stranger could have opened alone. What Curtis was given access to that summer, closely held ceremony, and the beliefs beneath it altered him profoundly. So did the people themselves, and the friendships that began there.
He was back in Seattle only a few weeks. Then he left again, on the first trip he had planned and paid for himself: south to Arizona, to the Navajo, Apache, and Hopi.
Older Edward Curtis
The photogravures were sold, by design, only as part of the complete twenty-volume, twenty-portfolio set of The North American Indian. But Curtis was on the road constantly to lecture, and he used those travels to sell photographs of other kinds, he was a superb craftsman and a master printer, and the years of experiment had left him fluent in a range of processes. Platinum prints, gelatin silver prints, cyanotypes, goldtones, hand-colored prints: he found a market for each, and the income slowed the bleeding enough to keep the work alive. Volumes and portfolios twelve through twenty appeared between 1921 and 1930.
The cost of that pursuit was his health. He had driven himself past the limit for years, and in 1930, with the project barely finished, he collapsed, a complete physical and nervous breakdown. Two years passed before he recovered. He spent the last two decades of his life in Los Angeles near his daughter Beth, and died in 1952, penniless and largely forgotten.
