EDWARD S. CURTIS (1868 – 1952)
ARTISTS
Edward Sheriff Curtis was an American photographer and ethnologist renowned for his extensive documentation of the Native American peoples of the American West. In 1906 he secured financial backing from J. P. Morgan to produce The North American Indian, a monumental 20-volume project featuring 1,500 photographs and accompanying ethnographic texts. Although Morgan funded the fieldwork, Curtis received no salary and ultimately spent more than two decades completing the series.
With a small team—including journalist William E. Myers, assistant Bill Phillips, and anthropologist Frederick Webb Hodge—Curtis traveled widely across North America. He photographed over 80 tribes, created more than 40,000 images, recorded 10,000 wax-cylinder sound recordings, and collected detailed information on languages, customs, ceremonies, and daily life. His work aimed to preserve the memory of cultures he believed were rapidly disappearing.
A total of 222 complete sets of The North American Indian were eventually published. Today, Curtis’s photographs and ethnographic materials remain a foundational—though often debated—record of Native American cultural history. His work was notably revisited at the Rencontres d’Arles festival in 1973.