Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated Paperback - 2000

From the rear cover

For almost four decades from the 1890s onwards, Edward S. Curtis took thousands of photographs of Native Americans all over the West and his assistants collected masses of other data - myths, recordings of music and ceremonies, folk tales, language vocabularies, and histories. This material was published in The North American Indian (1907-30), in twenty volumes of illustrated text and twenty portfolios of photographs; the project was supported by Theodore Roosevelt and funded in part by J. Pierpont Morgan, and spawned exhibitions, postcards, magazine articles, lecture series, a "musicale", and the very first narrative documentary film. While not unique, the project was bigger, better funded, and more famous than any of its time, and its images still retain their influence today. Neither a eulogy to Curtis's achievement nor a debunking of it, this book is an honest study of the project as a collective whole: what it was, who was involved, and what it meant. Mick Gidley examines the historical documentation such as letters and field memoirs of Curtis and other participants in the project - including Native American assistants and informants - and synthesizes the ideological, governmental, aesthetic, economic, and anthropological forces in the project.