Edward S. Curtis

Assimilation Policy and the “Vanishing” Paradigm

After establishing a successful portrait studio in Seattle, Curtis joined the Harriman Alaska Expedition in 1899 as an official photographer at the invitation of C. Hart Merriam and George Bird Grinnell. A Smithsonian chronology records that in 1900 he traveled with Grinnell to a Sun Dance on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana, then began photographing in the Southwest; by 1904 he had announced plans for a large-scale publication^*15. This was the period in which his work expanded from the commercial portrait studio to travel with scientists and ethnographers engaged in classifying and recording societies, forming the basis for the later twenty-volume project.

Recent work by Jen Rose Smith has reconsidered this beginning through land as well as portraiture. She analyzes the scientific surveys, resource studies, and territorial classifications Curtis encountered on the 1899 Alaska expedition as part of a colonial geography in which Indigenous representation and dispossession intersected^*29. This does not explain the whole later project through a single Alaskan experience. It does, however, show that the twenty-volume structure—organizing people by “tribe” and region—cannot be separated from contemporary systems for classifying land and populations.

That conception of time also shaped the choice of subjects. Schools, wage labor, railroads, markets, Euro-American clothing, and federal policy appear less often than traditional dress, horses, tipis, ceremonies, and natural landscapes. A photograph can preserve one part of reality with great precision while downplaying others through decisions about what counts as culturally representative. Curtis’s work makes concrete how preservation and exclusion can operate within the same documentary act.

The relation between ethnography and photography at the time was itself varied. Smithsonian-affiliated archives preserve extensive materials gathered by government agencies and anthropologists according to different systems for classifying language, material culture, and ceremony^*15. Curtis drew on the authority of ethnography while combining it with Pictorialist aesthetics and a deluxe publication intended for wealthy subscribers. That combination gave The North American Indian an authority unlike either an administrative record or a conventional fine-art photobook.

Patronage, Publication, and the Research Network

Support from J. P. Morgan beginning in 1906 enabled Curtis to sustain decades of photography, field research, plate making, and publication^*3. The North American Indian appeared between 1907 and 1930 as twenty text volumes and twenty large portfolios, ultimately incorporating roughly 2,200 images alongside vocabularies, oral accounts, music, and other research^*5. Expensive paper and photogravure printing positioned the publication as an authoritative object for affluent owners, libraries, and research institutions.

Curtis was not the project’s only producer. Morgan Library research identifies Alexander B. Upshaw, George Hunt, William E. Myers, and others as interpreters, researchers, writers, and cultural advisers^*9. Patrons, editors, researchers, Indigenous cultural intermediaries, and the people photographed all participated in the project under unequal relations of power. Behind the appearance of a single, unified author called “Curtis,” many people supplied knowledge and shaped decisions.

Across Smithsonian holdings, letters, field records, and variant prints survive alongside the finished volumes, allowing researchers to follow the selection process that produced the publication^*7. The completed twenty volumes homogenize a “Curtis viewpoint,” while the production record separates the contributions of patronage, editing, local collaborators, and printing technologies at different moments.

The finished project required long-term editing from the outset; it was never simply an accumulation of photographic trips. Mick Gidley compares proofs, publishing plans, and textual revisions from the early volumes, showing repeated selection and rearrangement between fieldwork and final publication^*27. The coherent world of The North American Indian was made through editorial decisions about which communities and regions would form a volume, which photographs would appear as text illustrations or large portfolio plates, and which forms of knowledge would remain in prose.

Staging, Printing, and the Construction of Time

Curtis’s canonical images use soft focus, low viewpoints, smoke, backlighting, simplified backgrounds, and selected traditional clothing to place people in spaces that are difficult to locate in contemporary time^*6. In In a Piegan Lodge, a clock visible in the original negative was removed from the published image; the British Library version and related material preserve evidence of the alteration^*22. The missing clock is a symbolic example of a wider pattern in which modern objects, institutions, and ways of life were selectively reduced, producing a consistent image of Indigenous culture before modernization.

The surfaces of platinum prints and photogravures strengthened this temporal effect. Platinum prints discussed by the National Museum of the American Indian use broad tonal ranges and matte surfaces to bind skin, feathers, smoke, and background into continuous gradations, creating quiet volume instead of abrupt local contrast^*20. In the books, photogravure preserved deep blacks and subtle tonal transitions while making editioned reproduction possible^*19. Staging, exposure, plate making, and printing therefore worked as one chain. The politics of the project extends from the choice of subject to the form through which a particular past was made beautiful and memorable.

This staging also belongs to the history of Pictorialism. Smithsonian American Art Museum collection records place Curtis within histories of fine-art photography as well^*18. Soft focus, backlighting, smoke, and deep tonal range functioned as visual conventions through which photography acquired artistic value at the time. Their political force lies inside that aesthetic achievement: beauty itself helped make a particular historical image persuasive.

Collaboration and Indigenous Agency

Recent scholarship has also revised accounts of Curtis’s fieldwork that describe it only as a site of unilateral control by a white photographer. George Hunt, deeply knowledgeable about Kwakwaka’wakw society, worked as a cultural intermediary in research and filmmaking, while Upshaw supported research on Apsáalooke language and history^*9. Sitters brought their own knowledge of clothing, ceremonies, family relations, and personal names to the encounter. These facts do not erase the project’s colonial terms, but the archive records Indigenous decisions and actions within them.

Shamoon Zamir’s The Gift of the Face reconsiders this collaboration through portraiture and time^*13. An account organized only around the “vanishing race” paradigm risks collapsing the specificity of individual faces, names, and collaborations with cultural intermediaries into one explanation. Zamir retains the critique of the colonial frame while asking how portraits may also preserve evidence of social change and community self-understanding. This approach allows individual photographs to be considered alongside, and not absorbed into, a single ideological explanation.

Old Images / New Views, developed by Rutgers and the UBC Museum of Anthropology, presents Indigenous scholars, writers, and curators adding new captions and testimony to historical photographs and returning them to histories of ancestors and families^*10. Once the photographer’s title and publication context cease to function as the only final meaning, the archive can reenter community memory. Critical work on Curtis increasingly asks who appears in a photograph, who supplied information, and which descriptions were added later.

Zamir’s study critiques the project’s colonial structure without fixing Indigenous participants once again as passive “subjects”^*24. Upshaw’s education and research skills show that his role exceeded supplying information to a white project; he moved between multiple worlds as a modern Indigenous intellectual. Current readings of Curtis therefore depend on resisting the return of such complex biographies to generalized tribal types.

Twenty Volumes and Photogravure

The basic unit of the project is the relationship among volume, text, illustration, and portfolio. Northwestern University’s digital edition presents the prose and images according to the original structure, with portraits, dwellings, ceremonies, crafts, and landscapes arranged through the logic of each chapter^*5. Large portfolio plates have greater visual autonomy than illustrations embedded in the text and more strongly assume the character of fine-art photographs. The authority of the project grew from the proximity of ethnographic explanation and Pictorialist viewing within the same publication.

The twenty volumes divide regions and communities in sequence and combine photographs with histories, daily life, religion, material culture, and linguistic material. Library of Congress cataloging records vocabularies continuing into later volumes and twenty large portfolios corresponding to the text volumes^*28. Through this sequence, individual portraits are placed within geographically defined chapters and become part of a publication system classifying an overall entity called “the North American Indian.” The fusion of ethnographic taxonomy and aesthetically finished plates gave Curtis’s historical image much of its authority.

The National Museum of the American Indian preserves photogravure copper plates and proofs, keeping the production process from negative to final plate as physical evidence^*12. Selection of negatives, retouching, plate making, paper, ink, and book sequence each added decisions to the image. Staging therefore continued beyond the photographic encounter into the design of the publication itself.

The Vanishing Race and Film

The Vanishing Race—Navaho, included in the first volume, places a group of riders moving away from the camera into a dark image, making the idea of disappearance explicit through both title and composition^*23. By contrast, a portrait such as White Man Runs Him, Apsaroke identifies a specific person by name, providing a route from the abstract category of “Indian” back toward family and community history^*14. Symbolic images and identifiable individuals coexist in the same archive, preventing the body of work from being exhausted by a single political judgment.

The 1914 film In the Land of the Head Hunters shared the impulse to preserve culture before its supposed disappearance, yet its production was not a straightforward ethnographic recording. Research published by the University of Washington Press traces collaboration with Kwakwaka’wakw performers, staged action, clothing, narrative, music, and later restoration, reconsidering the film as an intercultural production^*2. The reenactment of traditional life reveals Curtis’s orientation toward the past, while the film itself depended on the knowledge and performance of the people who appeared in it.

Ethnography and Pictorialism

Curtis is difficult to place because the ethnographic quantity of information and the aesthetic unity of Pictorialism occupy the same project. For an ethnographic record, modern clothing, schools, commodities, wage labor, and the effects of policy are also crucial information. Yet the representative images give less weight to such features than to traditional dress, natural landscapes, ceremony, and the stillness of portraiture. As the Morgan Library has shown, these selections reduce the visible present of assimilation policy and locate “authentic culture” in an imagined past^*9.

Aesthetic finish and politics are joined within the same formal operation. Deep photogravure tones, light, and simplified backgrounds make the photographs compelling, and that attraction helps the same historical image recur with authority. Because form itself contributes to the persuasiveness of the “vanishing race” narrative, technical criticism and colonial critique meet in the analysis of the same image.

The North American Indian also changed over the twenty-three years of its publication. Shannon Egan argues that the aesthetic and political approach of individual volumes responded to changes in American modernism and contemporary representations of Indigenous peoples^*25. The overarching narrative of disappearance coexists with shifts from volume to volume and period to period, so the vast archive cannot be reduced to one unchanging style.

Recontextualizing the Archive

Museums today increasingly acknowledge the artistic value of Curtis’s photographs while making the power relations of their production explicit. The Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History places staging and stereotyping at the center of its presentation^*16. The James Museum has worked with tribes and communities to add personal names and cultural context^*17. Such recontextualization moves beyond the choice between “beautiful but inaccurate” and “valuable record,” allowing each image to be examined for what it records precisely and what it constructs through the photographer’s program.

Seattle Art Museum’s 2018 exhibition Double Exposure presented more than one hundred works by Curtis in the same space as contemporary Indigenous artists Marianne Nicolson, Tracy Rector, and Will Wilson^*1. The exhibition did more than add corrective labels to old photographs. By placing them beside images in which present-day Indigenous artists photograph their own bodies, communities, and lands, it set contemporary self-representation against Curtis’s construction of a Native America confined to the past. The exhibition format itself became a way of testing the authority of historical photographs through image-making by later generations of the communities represented.

The dispersal of Curtis material across the Library of Congress, Smithsonian, Northwestern, the National Museum of the American Indian, the Morgan Library, and other institutions also makes it possible to compare the finished twenty volumes with their production history. Research notes, letters, copper plates, variant prints, and unpublished material allow the project to be examined beyond the author’s stated intentions^*15. The scale of the surviving archive does not excuse its colonial logic. It does, however, allow later researchers and communities to test that logic, revise earlier interpretations, and reuse the material for different histories.

Contemporary work by artists including Larry McNeil and Will Wilson, as presented by the Smithsonian, responds to the visual tradition that treated Indigenous peoples as remnants of the past while referring back to historical platinum printing and portrait formats^*7. The National Museum of the American Indian’s Indelible likewise places historic photographic processes in dialogue with contemporary Indigenous artists, connecting the inheritance of technique to criticism of inherited historical images^*21. In these works, Curtis’s photographs no longer occupy the position of an authoritative final answer; they become images to which new portraits can respond.

The twenty volumes constructed a vast visual system that fixed Indigenous cultures in the past, yet their scale also preserved information about many people, languages, clothes, objects, and places. Researchers and communities now detach that information from the publication’s original narrative and restore names, family histories, and circumstances of making. The uses of the surviving images are not fixed by the meanings Curtis assigned them; communities and researchers continue to redirect the archive. The Curtis materials therefore preserve an ongoing history in which colonial documentation can become an object of both critique and reuse.

This recontextualization also goes beyond declaring the work “fake” and stopping there. A Library of Congress research guide presents the Curtis materials as usable through multiple lines of inquiry, including photographic history, women’s history, ethnography, and family history^*11. Once alterations are made explicit, the people, clothing, objects, place names, and languages in the images can be cross-checked with other records, allowing information preserved by the photograph to be returned to community histories while the photographer’s construction remains open to criticism.

Nick Yablon analyzes the case of The Oath—Apsaroke, which in 1913 was contributed to a record project intended for “future viewers”^*26. A single Curtis photograph could therefore pass among ethnography, art photography, historical record, and the institution of the time capsule, acquiring different temporal roles according to the setting in which it was used.