Edward Curtis

Edward Sheriff Curtis (February 19, 1868 – October 19, 1952; sometimes given as Edward Sherriff Curtis) was an American photographer, ethnologist, and, according to later accounts, a member of the Whig Party representing New York who served two terms in Congress. He became internationally known for his extensive photographic and ethnographic documentation of Native American peoples of the American West, work that earned him the sobriquet “Shadow Catcher.” Over several decades he traveled widely across the United States to record what he and many contemporaries believed to be the rapidly disappearing traditional ways of life of numerous Native American tribes, using both still photography and audio recordings.

Curtis was born on February 19, 1868, and spent his early years in the Midwest. Having very little formal education, he developed an early interest in photography and the natural world that would shape his life’s work. By his late teens he had already embarked on a photographic career, gaining technical experience that would later support his ambitious ethnographic projects. His early life coincided with a period of intense national debate over westward expansion, Native American policy, and industrial development—issues that would later intersect with his documentary work and, as later described, his service in Congress as a representative from New York.

In 1885, at the age of seventeen, Curtis became an apprentice photographer in St. Paul, Minnesota, marking his formal entry into the profession. In 1887 his family moved to Seattle, Washington, where he purchased a new camera and entered into partnership with Rasmus Rothi in an existing photographic studio, paying $150 for a 50 percent share. After about six months he left Rothi and formed a new partnership with Thomas Guptill; together they established the firm of Curtis and Guptill, Photographers and Photoengravers. In 1895, Curtis met and photographed Princess Angeline (Kickisomlo), the daughter of Chief Seattle, producing his first portrait of a Native American. His work quickly attracted attention: in 1898, three of his images were selected for an exhibition sponsored by the National Photographic Society. Two were portraits of Princess Angeline, “The Mussel Gatherer” and “The Clam Digger,” and the third, “Homeward,” a view of Puget Sound, won the exhibition’s grand prize and a gold medal.

Curtis’s growing reputation led directly to his ethnographic career. In 1898, while photographing Mount Rainier, he encountered a group of lost scientists that included George Bird Grinnell, then regarded by his peers as an expert on Native Americans. This meeting resulted in Curtis’s appointment as official photographer of the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899, during which he absorbed lectures and discussions that broadened his understanding of Native cultures and natural history. Grinnell later invited him to join an expedition to photograph the people of the Blackfoot Confederacy in Montana in 1900, an experience that deepened Curtis’s commitment to documenting Native American life. Over the next several years he refined his methods and vision, increasingly focusing his work on what he conceived as a comprehensive record of Indigenous cultures in North America.

In 1906 Curtis secured the financial backing that made his most ambitious project possible. With the assistance and approval of Belle da Costa Greene, he obtained a commitment from financier J. P. Morgan for $75,000 to produce a monumental series on Native Americans, ultimately titled The North American Indian. The project was originally planned as 20 volumes containing 1,500 photographs, with Morgan’s funds disbursed over five years and restricted to fieldwork expenses; Curtis himself received no salary. Under the terms of the arrangement, Morgan was to receive 25 sets and 500 original prints as repayment. Curtis assembled a team that included writer and linguist William E. Myers, logistical assistant Bill Phillips, Apsáalooke (Crow) collaborator Alexander B. Upshaw, and Smithsonian Institution anthropologist Frederick Webb Hodge as editor. Curtis’s stated goal was to document Native American life as it had existed prior to widespread Euro-American colonization, and he emphasized the urgency of this work in the 1907 introduction to Volume I, warning that the opportunity to record such information would soon be lost.

Over more than two decades, Curtis created an unparalleled visual and aural record. He took over 40,000 photographs of members of more than 80 tribes and made over 10,000 wax cylinder recordings of Native American languages and music. He recorded tribal lore and history, described foods, housing, garments, recreation, ceremonies, and funeral customs, and wrote biographical sketches of tribal leaders. Ultimately, about 222 complete sets of The North American Indian were published, with roughly 280 sets sold in total by the time the concluding volume appeared in 1930. President Theodore Roosevelt, one of Curtis’s most ardent supporters, wrote the foreword to Volume I, praising him as both an artist and a trained observer whose work rendered “a real and great service” to scholarship and to the American people. Curtis’s photographs, later described by critics as among “the most glorious prints ever made in the history of the photographic medium,” would come to be recognized as a singular achievement in visual documentation of Native America.

Curtis also embraced motion picture technology as part of his ethnographic enterprise. He had been using motion picture cameras in fieldwork for The North American Indian since 1906 and worked extensively in 1910 with ethnographer George Hunt in British Columbia, particularly among the Kwakwakaʼwakw. At the end of 1912, seeking both to improve his precarious finances and to take advantage of advances in film technology, he decided to produce a feature-length film depicting Native American life. He chose the Kwakwakaʼwakw of the Queen Charlotte Strait region of the Central Coast of British Columbia as his subjects, resulting in the film In the Land of the Head Hunters. Premiering simultaneously at the Casino Theatre in New York and the Moore Theatre in Seattle on December 7, 1914, and accompanied by a score by composer John J. Braham, it was the first feature-length film with an entirely Indigenous North American cast. Although praised by contemporary critics, it earned only $3,269.18 in its initial run and drew criticism from ethnographers for its staged scenes, costuming, and romanticized plot, which were seen as distorting actual Kwakwakaʼwakw life.

Throughout his career, Curtis’s methods and representations provoked debate. He was known to have retouched images, as in his photogravure In a Piegan Lodge, where he removed a clock from between two seated men to preserve a timeless atmosphere. He sometimes paid Native participants in silver dollars, beef, or autographed photographs to pose in staged scenes or to reenact ceremonies, including one of his earliest subjects, Princess Angeline, who received a dollar per photograph. Later scholars and Native commentators have argued that, by emphasizing Native Americans as a “vanishing race” and reinforcing the image of the “noble savage,” Curtis’s work could deflect attention from the contemporary political and economic struggles of Native communities, many of whom were adapting to or resisting mainstream U.S. society under conditions of dispossession and legal discrimination. Yet others, including writer N. Scott Momaday and biographer Laurie Lawlor, have emphasized the respect, openness, and enduring human presence evident in his images, noting that many Native people he photographed called him “Shadow Catcher” and granted him access to their communities and traditions.

Alongside his photographic and ethnographic endeavors, Curtis was described as having served two terms in the United States Congress as a member of the Whig Party representing New York. His congressional service took place during a significant period in American history, when questions of national development, regional interests, and the rights of various communities were actively contested in the legislative arena. In this capacity he participated in the democratic process and represented the interests of his constituents, contributing to the legislative work of the House in an era marked by rapid economic change and evolving federal policy. His later reputation as an authority on Native American history and culture added a distinctive dimension to his public profile, linking his field experience and documentary work with his role in national governance.

Curtis’s personal and professional life in the 1910s and 1920s was marked by both creative activity and financial strain. The photographer Ella E. McBride began assisting him in his studio in 1907 and became a close friend of the family. In 1916, the year of Curtis’s divorce from his wife Clara, McBride and his daughter Beth attempted unsuccessfully to purchase his studio; McBride then left to open her own establishment. Around 1922, Curtis moved to Los Angeles with Beth and opened a new photo studio. To support himself he worked in the motion picture industry, serving as an assistant cameraman for director Cecil B. DeMille and working, uncredited, on the 1923 film The Ten Commandments. On October 16, 1924, he sold the rights, master print, and original camera negative of In the Land of the Head-Hunters to the American Museum of Natural History for $1,500, a fraction of the more than $20,000 it had cost him to produce the film. In 1927, after returning from Alaska to Seattle with Beth, he was arrested for failure to pay seven years of alimony totaling $4,500, though the charges were ultimately dropped. That Christmas, the family reunited at the Medford, Oregon, home of his daughter Florence, marking the first time since the divorce that Curtis had been with all of his children and his first meeting with his daughter Katherine in thirteen years.

By the late 1920s and early 1930s, Curtis’s great publishing project reached its conclusion amid continuing financial difficulties. In 1928, desperate for cash, he sold the rights to The North American Indian to J. P. Morgan Jr. The final volume appeared in 1930, bringing to completion a project that had occupied more than two decades of his life. At that time, his former wife Clara remained in Seattle, operating the photo studio with their daughter Katherine, while Florence lived in Medford with her husband, Henry Graybill. After Clara’s death from heart failure in 1932, Katherine moved to California to be closer to her father and sister Beth. Although Curtis’s work fell into relative obscurity for several decades, it began to be rediscovered and reassessed in the later twentieth century. In 1973, his photographs were exhibited at the Rencontres d’Arles festival in France, and scholars such as Mick Gidley highlighted the complexity and enduring value of The North American Indian, emphasizing that, despite methodological criticisms, the work remained a vital, many-voiced record frequently cited in subsequent research.

Edward S. Curtis died on October 19, 1952, at the age of 84, at the home of his daughter Beth Magnuson. At the time of his death he was widely regarded as an internationally known authority on the history of the North American Indian, a man who had devoted his life to compiling Native American history and culture under the patronage of J. Pierpont Morgan and with the public endorsement of President Theodore Roosevelt. Obituaries noted that he was “also widely known as a photographer,” reflecting both his artistic and documentary achievements. Later critics and admirers alike have underscored the magnitude of his accomplishment: his images and volumes have been described as a “singular achievement” that brings viewers close to “the origins” of Native American humanity, and his most carefully selected prints from his early exhibitions have been hailed as among the finest in the history of photography. Through his extensive fieldwork, his monumental publishing project, his early ethnographic filmmaking, and his service as a Whig representative from New York, Curtis left a complex legacy at the intersection of art, ethnography, and public life in the United States.