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Native Nations: First Americans as Seen by Edward S. Curtis
Christopher Cardozo (ed.)
Between 1900 and roughly 1930, Edward S. Curtis pursued one of the most ambitious—and controversial—projects in the history of photography: a twenty-volume record of Native North American peoples, made at enormous personal and financial cost. This 1993 oversize volume, edited by the Curtis specialist Christopher Cardozo with a foreword by George Horse Capture, distills that vast archive into roughly 110 plates, reproduced as exquisite quadratones to a standard Curtis himself never saw. The portraits—Chief Joseph, a Mohave potter, faces from dozens of nations—are hauntingly beautiful and, as modern readers know, artfully staged. The book invites both admiration and hard questions about how these images were made and what they claim to show. Either way, it's a stunning object and a compact way into an unforgettable body of work.
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The artist
Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952) devoted some thirty years and a fortune to The North American Indian, a monumental photographic and ethnographic survey backed early on by J. P. Morgan. He also recorded thousands of wax-cylinder audio recordings. Acclaimed in his day, later forgotten, he was rediscovered in the 1970s and has been debated ever since.
The book
Edited by Christopher Cardozo and published by Bulfinch Press in 1993, this oversize volume selects about 110 images from Curtis's twenty published volumes, reproduced as quadratones by the master printer Richard Benson. A foreword by George Horse Capture, a Native scholar, frames the pictures with care.
How to read it
The images are magnificent and also constructed—Curtis sometimes removed signs of modern life and supplied costumes to fit a vanishing-race narrative. Read alongside that knowledge, they remain powerful and genuinely informative, and Horse Capture's foreword models the balance.
For more context
Curtis's staging has made his work a touchstone in debates about representation, salvage ethnography, and who gets to picture whom—questions very much alive in how Native history is shown today.
Sources
- Type
- Book
- Author / Maker
- Christopher Cardozo (ed.)
- Publisher
- Callaway Editions / Bulfinch Press (Little, Brown)
- Place of publication
- Boston
- Year
- 1993
- ISBN
- 0-8212-2052-7
- Format
- Oversize
- Shelf
- Art
- Location
- Maine