Imprinted Life discussion

Edward S. Curtis: Coming to Light/ Anne Makepeace. An exquisitely illustrated book by the filmmaker Anne Makepeace, who also produced a film documentary of it called "Coming to Light". In the book, printed by National Geographic, she visits a Hopi Reservation in northern Arizona, bringing along with her Curtis's photographs in hopes that the elders would recognize the portraits and places, which was Curtis's lifelong quest to document before history completely erased the culture of North American Indians:

...Curtis discovered the richness and diversity of the western tribes and became determined to make a record of their traditional ways of life before they disappeared.

Curtis produced twenty volumes of sepia photographs that documented the daily life within about eighty tribes in Canada and Western US between 1900 and 1930.

Thanks for recommending this Asmah! I will try to a access a copy ASAP. It is an area I am very interested in.

Haaze wrote: "Thanks for recommending this Asmah! I will try to a access a copy ASAP. It is an area I am very interested in."

When the Hopi elders and descendants recognized the portraits and places, they added info about how Curtis took the photos and what the places meant to the tribes. They also got reconnected with their lost traditions.

The author Anne Makepeace produced a film in conjunction with the National Geographic book. Your city and university libraries might have the VHS version, but there's also a DVD of it. There's a brief YouTube clip.

Curtis in thirty years documented the disappearing culture of North American Indians from the Southwest to the Arctic. Born in 1868, his family moved from the mid-west to Seattle.

Chapter 1 takes place from 1868 to 1900, the first thirty-two years of his life. He has become a professional, prestigious photographer and engraver in his own business. He is part of the new thinking about photography as a subjective art with composed scenes rather than as a mechanical act. He and his brother Asahel observe the the rush of prospectors to the Klondike. Curtis participates in the government-sponsored Harriman Expedition of scientists, naturalists, artists, and writers to "document and classify the natural world" of Alaska. Three photographs mentioned in Chapter 1 are "The Mussel Gatherer", "The Clam Digger", and "Homeward".

Chapter 2 "Light on Glass" , years 1900-1906: Curtis photographs Native American customs like the Sun Dance and Snake Dance and finds Indians are reticent about their religion. He also photographs the last great Indian chiefs--Joseph, Geronimo, Red Hawk, and Red Cloud--and traditional Indian daily activities. Out of field season, he lectures to audiences, shows films and slides, and exhibits his photographs. He meets Theodore Roosevelt and J Pierpont Morgan, whom he convinces of the value of his enormous undertaking to create art in which is preserved a fading way of American life.

Chapter 3 "Adventures in the Field", years 1906-1910: Edward Curtis along with crew spent expensive months in the field from Arizona to Montana and to South Dakota, composing scenes for photographing and writing and recording text for the twenty volumes he planned to publish with the financial support of the financier J. P. Morgan. The author Anne Makepeace quotes the Commissioner of Indian Affairs Francis Leupp about Curtis' project:

...to see the Indian not as he has been pictured in romance or preserved in the mummy-wrappings of archeology, but as he is, in his life, in his mind, in his spirit, in his artistic ideals and sympathies, and in those traditions which afforded his people their only substitute for literature...

Up to this point, Curtis researched and published Volumes I-V, works of text and art, selling subscriptions for the entire, twenty-volume set at $3,000 at a time of the nation's economic downturn.

Chapter 4 "In the Land of the Head-Hunters", years 1910-1916: In trying to raise subscriptions for the twenty-volume set "The North American Indian", Curtis went into business to make a motion picture and a picture musicale/opera. The musicale went on tour--lecture, lantern slides, and orchestrated music rolled into one. The ethnographic, 35mm motion picture was made with the participation of formerly head-hunting Kwakiutl Indians of Vancouver Island, who replicated the "pre-contact" tribal sets by the ocean and the traditional costumes and pageantry and who acted out the roles according to their castes. It was a forerunner of "Nanook of the North".

Chapter 5 "Rough Seas", years 1920-1927: Curtis opens a photographic studio in Los Angeles (where Wiggins' Shadow Catcher is set, if you read that), running the motion-picture camera for Cecil B DeMille and other director/producers (e.g. "The Ten Commandments"). In fieldwork season, he lives outdoors, researching and photographing traditional Indian culture, composing/manipulating Indian scenes to block out modern intrusions, such as missionaries, agents, and settlers. But the authenticity and beauty of the culture is harder to find so he devotes the final Volume XX of the North American Indian series to the Eskimos on islands of the Bering Sea, where treacherous weather over open sea has so far kept out intruders. In fact, he and the boat-crew manage to survive by a hair's breadth wind, fog, squall, and blizzard to get there and back.

Chapter 6 "The Lure of God", years 1927-1952. After thirty years of fieldwork to produce the twenty-volume set "The North American Indian", Edward S. Curtis got interested in book writing (Indian Days Of The Long Ago) and in metallurgy, striking a northern California claim and inventing a machine to extract fine gold. After a life-long separation from family life, he lived closely with his son and daughters until his death.

Epilogue "A Legacy Restored": The illustrations from Vol 1-20 of "The North American Indian", are wonderful but you'd have to visit a library that owns a set to read, if they will allow you. Curtis wrote the text from observations, interviews, and sound recordings.