Edward S Curtis

Historic Emergence of 100 unpublished Edward S. Curtis photographs and personal journal from Alaska! Join Edward Curtis on his harrowing journey on the Bering Sea in the summer of 1927. His first-hand accounts, as written in his personal journal, bring to life his final field season to complete The North American Indian project. This Alaska voyage is truly an example of the tenacity it took for Curtis to complete his grand opus. Between the towering gale-driven seas breaking over the deck, the blizzard snow conditions, the falling barometers, and the hole in the boat, it is a miracle he and his crew lived to tell this story.Included with Curtis' historic journal are 100 previously unpublished photographs. Occasionally unseen Curtis prints surface, but never 100 at once. Be the first to experience these images and make this book a part of your personal library. "How I managed to keep that log during all the stress is beyond my present understanding, yet on reading it twenty years after it was written, it brought the day by day incidents, locations and storm conditions vividly to mind. Frankly, it's reading gave me the shivers, and I constantly marveled that at any time in my life I had the strength and endurance to do such a season's work." ~ Edward Curtis

The U.S. Library of Congress presents an online exhibit of the published photogravure images from the volumes of "The North American Indian" by American photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952). Curtis portrayed the traditional customs and lifestyles of eighty Indian tribes.

Photographer Edward S. Curtis was a prolific photographer and recorder of Native American culture. This is a collection of his most moving, cultural portraits.

For almost three decades, Edward Curtis photographed the First Peoples of the North American West and studied their cultures. As part of his fieldwork, he cruised the Pacific Northwest coast and ventured into the lands of the Blackfoot Confederacy, both north and south of the Medicine Line. Alarmed that the traditional Aboriginal ways of life seemed in danger of disappearing forever, Curtis made an incredible effort to capture the daily routines, character and dignity of First Peoples through photography and audio recordings. Against seemingly insurmountable odds and at substantial personal and financial sacrifice, he completed the 20-volume masterpiece The North American Indian, deemed “the most gigantic undertaking in the making of books since the King James edition of the Bible” by the New York Herald. With more than 150 photographs, Edward S. Curtis Above the Medicine Line is both a compelling narrative that sheds new light on the Curtis mystique and a fascinating overview of many of the First Peoples he studied a century ago.

Housing a wealth of ethnographic information yet steeped in nostalgia and predicated upon the assumption that Native Americans were a "vanishing race," Curtis's work has been both influential and controversial, and its vision of Native Americans must still be reckoned with today."--BOOK JACKET.

The traditional cultures of the Indians of the Great Plains?Lakotas, Cheyennes, Wichitas, Arikaras, Crows, Osages, Assiniboins, Comanches, Crees, and Mandans, among others?are recalled in stunning detail in this collection of photographs by Edward S. Curtis (1868?1952). Curtis is the best-known photographer of Native Americans because of his monumental work, The North American Indian (1907?1930), which consists of twenty portfolios of large photogravures and twenty volumes of text on more than eighty Indian groups in the West. He took pictures of Plains Indians for over twenty years, and his photographs reflect both prevailing attitudes about Indians and Curtis's own vision of differences among the Native peoples whom he photographed. ø Curtis's photographs have exerted an enduring influence?both positive and negative?on mainstream American culture. They have inspired countless books, articles, and photographic exhibitions, and they continue to appear on posters, postcards, and other souvenirs. Accompanying the remarkable array of images in this book are essays by leading scholars that place the photographs within their proper critical, cultural, and historical contexts. The scholars contributing to this work are Martha H. Kennedy, Martha A. Sandweiss, Mick Gidley, and Duane Niatum.

"Curtis spent the best part of his life-nearly thirty years-documenting what he considered to be the traditional way of life for Indians living in the trans-Mississippi West. He took more than 40,000 photographs, collected more than 350 traditional Indian tales, and made more than 10,000 sound recordings of Indian speeches and music His magnum opus was The North American Indian." (Pritzker, Edward S. Curtis, 6).