He found a photographer to manage his studio in Seattle, but more important, he found a financial backer with the funds for a project of the scale he had in mind. President Theodore Roosevelt commissioned Curtis to photograph his daughter’s wedding and to do some Roosevelt family portraits.īut Curtis was burning to return to the West and seek out more Native Americans to document. His photographs became known for their sheer beauty. “It was at the start of my concerted effort to learn about the Plains Indians and to photograph their lives,” Curtis wrote, “and I was intensely affected.” When he returned to Seattle, he mounted popular exhibitions of his Native American work, publishing magazine articles and then lecturing across the country. It was in Montana, under Grinnell’s tutelage, that Curtis became deeply moved by what he called the “primitive customs and traditions” of the Piegan people, including the “mystifying” Sun Dance he had witnessed. When Grinnell asked him to come on a visit to the Piegan Blackfeet in Montana the following year, Curtis did not hesitate. For two months, Curtis accompanied two dozen scientists, photographing everything from glaciers to Eskimo settlements. Harriman and including included the naturalist John Muir and the zoologist C. Curtis quickly befriended him, and the relationship led to the young photographer’s appointment as official photographer for the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899, led by the railroad magnate Edward H. Rainier when he came upon a group of prominent scientists who’d become lost among the group was the anthropologist George Bird Grinnell, an expert on Native American cultures. Yet it was a chance meeting in 1898 that set Curtis on the path away from his studio and his family. He paid her a dollar for each pose and noted, “This seemed to please her greatly, and with hands and jargon she indicated that she preferred to spend her time having pictures made than in digging clams.” And it was in Seattle in 1895 where Curtis did his first portrait of a Native American-that of Princess Angeline, the eldest daughter of Chief Sealth of the Duwamish tribe. The young family lived above the thriving Curtis Studio, which attracted society ladies who wanted their portraits taken by the handsome, athletic young man who made them look both glamorous and sophisticated. There, Curtis married 18-year-old Clara Phillips, purchased his own camera and a share in a local photography studio, and in 1893, the young couple welcomed a son, Harold-the first of their four children. Paul, Minnesota, and his life seemed to be taking a familiar course for a young man with a marketable trade, until the Curtis family packed up and moved west, eventually settling in Seattle. By age 17, he was an apprentice at a studio in St. The New York Herald hailed as “the most ambitious enterprise in publishing since the production of the King James Bible.”īorn in Wisconsin in 1868, Edward Sheriff Curtis took to photography at an early age. Pierpont Morgan and former president Theodore Roosevelt, but at great expense to his family life and his health, Curtis lived among dozens of native tribes, devoting his life to his calling until he produced a definitive and unparalleled work, The North American Indian. For thirty years, with the backing of men like J. Curtis worked in the belief that he was in a desperate race against time to document, with film, sound and scholarship, the North American Indian before white expansion and the federal government destroyed what remained of their natives’ way of life. At the beginning of the 20th century, Edward S. Year after year, he packed his camera and supplies-everything he’d need for months-and traveled by foot and by horse deep into the Indian territories.
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