He cozied up to Edith Roosevelt by preparing his special Roquefort salad dressing and sharing the recipe with her,and he naturally found time to talk up his Indian project. In 1904, when he was in his 30s, he wangled an invitation from Teddy Roosevelt to photograph the president and his children at their summer retreat outside Oyster Bay, on Long Island. Although he grew up dirt-poor and left school after the sixth grade, he knew how to hold his own among scholars and art collectors. Image by image, without any rhetoric, the photographs eloquently make the case for equal rights at a time when Native Americans were still maligned as illiterate, itinerant and unwashed.Ĭurtis was a charismatic presence, “all blue eyes and bounce in his step,” Egan writes.

An impressive number of Curtis’s photographs are devoted to women - mothers carrying their babies in papoose packs, old women with deeply lined faces, Sioux daughters with glittering eyes and long braids of hair. The tribal chief Joseph of the Nez Percé is portrayed as the face of Native American sorrow, his shell earrings glowing like moons against his dark skin. Curtis glamorized most everyone he photographed. Yet in Curtis’s case, the subjects were not celebrities but Native Americans. He seemed to place a proto-Avedonian emphasis on showing how intimate a photographer can be with his subject. Initially a society portraitist with a studio in Seattle, he disliked commercial work and gave up a lucrative career to lug his tripod and glass-plate negatives around as he climbed Mount Rainier or descended a ladder into a Hopi kiva crawling with rattlesnakes.Ĭurtis’s most memorable photographs are not action shots but formal portraits in which individuals appear in sensuous, sepia-toned close-up. Timothy Egan offers a stirring and affectionate portrait of an underknown figure in “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis.” Egan, a Seattle-based author and a writer for The New York Times, asks us to see Curtis as a hero in the mythic Western mode - i.e., outdoorsy, virile, untainted by bourgeois values. Curtis spent his final years holed up in Southern California, living a marginal hand-to-mouth existence and consuming a pound of carrots a day in the hope of warding off blindness. His goal, he said, was to salvage a heritage from oblivion, to document all the tribes in North America that were still intact.The result was his magnum opus, “The North American Indian,” a 20-volume text-and-image extravaganza, published between 19, that was praised and then forgotten in short order. Traveling by rail, wagon and foot, he undertook a project that struck observers as ambitious and possibly insane. Edward Curtis deserves to be remembered as the American artist who racked up the most miles.

Short nights of the shadow catcher