Lots more to photographer than images

Edward S. Curtis is remembered today for the trove of photographs – more than 40,000 of them – that he took of Indians of 80 North American tribes in the first three decades of the 20th century.

Curtis’ photogravure plates, narratives and field recordings are contained in his masterwork, the limited-edition “The North American Indian.” A complete set is 20 volumes, and one set recently was on sale for $1.4 million, said author Timothy Egan.

Most of the books about Curtis have emphasized his images.

	“Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher – The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis” by Timothy Egan Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28, 370 pp.

“That’s why I wanted to show the remarkable feat of anthropology, where Curtis recorded tribal myths and stories, language, diet and habits, everything that goes into how they lived, which he felt was quickly disappearing,” said Egan, whose new biography of Curtis is called “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher.”

“And I wanted to resurrect the reputation of a guy with a sixth-grade education who pulled this off.”

Curtis, the son of a sickly, circuit-riding preacher, grew up in Seattle. He ran a family photo studio. But he soon realized that documenting Indian life was, as Egan put it, his “magnificent obsession,” overriding the running of the studio and helping to raise a family.

Curtis’ focus on documenting Native Americans started with an old Indian woman nicknamed Princess Angeline, who lived in squalor in Seattle, the last surviving child of the chief of the Duwamish and Suquamish people. Curtis photographed her. That led him to the Tulalip reservation north of Seattle and to his career.

“… what stirred him most,” Egan writes, “was the Big Outside – mountains, brooding forests, a saltwater inlet untouched by machines, and these nearly spectral people who seemed to belong to the land.”

In 1900, Curtis was off to the Blackfeet reservation in Montana, the first of multiple visits to Indian homelands. The same year he photographed the Hopi. In 1904 he was a guest of President Theodore Roosevelt at his home on Sagamore Hill and later that year visited Acoma Pueblo.

Curtis often spent days preparing his photographic portraits. He wanted to get the cultural details right and wanted to understand, and present, his subjects in context, Egan said.

Curtis’ project had the financial backing of banker J.P. Morgan. Yet the photographer was frequently penniless. Curtis had been a handsome, internationally known figure when he started his journeys, but was bent and tearful when he appeared in a Seattle court in 1927 for failing to pay alimony. Curtis told the judge there was no money left over for him after paying fieldwork-related expenses.

Curtis died in 1952 in a cramped Beverly Hills, Calif., apartment.