Shadow Catcher: How Edward S. Curtis Documented American Indian Dignity and Beauty
not ready to give up his people’s culture or forget its past After meeting Geronimo near the end of the warrior’s life Curtis wrote The spirit of the Apache is not broken By the time he took Geronimo’s portrait Curtis had spent several years living among and photographing many North American tribes He took formal portraits just as he had done in his studio in Seattle Washington But he also traveled to where the Indians lived and worked He wanted to document a way of life that he thought might be erased by the spread of white civilization and industrialization With his photographs Curtis told a friend I want to make them live forever Curtis camera captured as he wrote in 1907 a scene in the high mountains of Apache-land just before the breaking rainstorm In the Territory of Arizona which was not yet a state an unknown Indian nicknamed Curtis the
Shadow Catcher because his photos captured both light and dark so well Others suggested that the name reflected Curtis ability to see shadows in a person’s heart or soul The trips into the Southwest were needed to achieve Curtis great goal to record the lives of Indians from the Great Plains to the Pacific as far north as Alaska But Curtis wanted to do more than use his considerable photographic skills He planned to learn about the tribes religions and daily lives hear their myths and write down their languages Using a wax cylinder he would record the sounds of the Indians words and music And he used an early movie camera to document even more of American Indian life No one had ever tried to do what Curtis hoped to do to study so many tribes in such detail Curtis wanted to share what he learned in a large set of books he called The North American Indian He felt great urgency to complete this monumental mission before the traditional ways of Indian culture disappeared forever When Curtis described his idea to Theodore Roosevelt the president replied No man could be doing anything more important
In the Bad Lands appeared in Volume 3 of Edward Curtis 20-volume work Curtis great project would have been bold for anyone to try but perhaps even more so for someone with his background Most scholars who studied the country’s Indian tribes had completed years of formal preparation Curtis education ended after elementary school in Minnesota where he spent most of his childhood But Curtis received a different kind of education while traveling through the state’s backcountry During the 1870s his father Johnson Curtis was a preacher who traveled by canoe to visit members of his church He took young Edward with him and the boy learned how to hunt camp and survive in harsh conditions Curtis also gave his son something else a camera lens he had brought home from the Civil War Following instructions in a photography magazine Edward built his own simple camera For most of
his life he would combine his love of the outdoors with his interest in taking pictures In 1887 the Curtis family headed west and settled near Seattle Curtis took a variety of jobs but photography seemed to have stuck in his mind Some time around 1890 he bought a camera His wooden box camera was completely unlike today’s digital cameras Big and bulky and weighing more than 20 pounds 9 kilograms the camera had to sit on a tripod to keep it steady Curtis would drape a black cloth over his head when taking a picture to keep unwanted light from affecting the negative The camera recorded images on a 14x17-inch 36x43-centimeter glass plate Though large and fragile the glass plates could be used to create photos with great detail Each photo required a new glass-plate negative After the images were on the plates Curtis made prints creating photos others could see and buy That was Curtis plan to use the camera to take pictures of people at a studio in Seattle The people would pay him for their portraits First though he had to learn something about studio photography He bought a share of an established studio and his new partner taught him the craft Soon he moved to another studio and acquired more skills while also studying the work of great photographers of the day Along the way he had met and married Clara Phillips and started a family In just a few years Curtis became one of Seattle’s leading photographers He had a gift for composition arranging the placement of objects in his pictures Along with taking studio portraits Curtis also ventured outside with his camera though he often used one much smaller than his first big wooden camera In 1895 he began to photograph some of the Indians who remained in Seattle even as more white settlers flooded in The most famous Indian in Seattle then was a woman the white residents called Princess Angeline She was the elderly daughter of Sealth a Suquamish chief in the region Sealth was also known as Chief Seattle and the city was named for him One day Curtis saw Angeline near the shore gathering clams and mussels As he later recalled The first photograph I ever made of Indians was of Princess Angeline Curtis took several photos of her working and a formal portrait which later appeared in The North American Indian
