Shadow Catcher: How Edward S. Curtis Documented American Indian Dignity and Beauty
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
Princess Angeline the daughter of Chief Seattle posed for a formal portrait Angeline at work was the subject of Clam Digger Both images appeared in Volume 9 of The North American Indian In 1898 Curtis entered two of his pictures of Angeline in a National Photographic Society exhibition A third called Homeward showed several Puget Sound Indians paddling a canoe It won the exhibition’s top prize and boosted Curtis fame Just outside Seattle stands 14,410-foot-high 4,392-meter-high Mount Rainier Curtis loved to explore it and other peaks in the region lugging his photography equipment with him On one trip he
