He learned woodcraft during forays with his preacher father to spread the Gospel to Native Americans in the Midwest and assumed responsibility at the age of fourteen for supporting his family. Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher restores him to his rightful place as a sensitive master photographer and a staunch advocate for indigenous rights.Ĭurtis terminated his formal schooling after the sixth grade. Egan's new book does much to explain Curtis's methods and motives, the difficulties and vicissitudes of his work, and the broader contexts of his "Big Idea" (41). Curtis, considered by some to be a hero of ethnographic documentation, has also been criticized as a manipulator who did not hesitate to stage scenes for the camera's lens and an opportunist who paid subjects and sometimes resorted to bribery to gain access to sacred objects not meant to be seen by the uninitiated. His aim (which became a full-blown obsession) was to document every Native American "tribe" that still adhered to traditions predating the incursion of European American land grabbers, railroads, fences, Indian agents, and missionaries. Curtis (1868–1952), the quixotic photographer who devoted thirty years of his life to The North American Indian, a twenty-volume set of brown-ink photogravures and related materials published between 19. Few researchers who have studied Native American cultures have inspired such a wide divergence of opinion as Edward S.
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