Edward Curtis

Edward Curtis was an American photographer and ethnologist best known for The North American Indian, a massive early twentieth century project combining photographs, sound recordings and written narrative intended to document the traditions and ways of life of Native American peoples before, as Curtis believed at the time, they disappeared. Funded in part by financier J.P. Morgan, the project eventually ran to twenty volumes produced over some three decades and included tens of thousands of photographs across more than eighty tribal groups. His romanticized, carefully staged portraits have since been criticized for smoothing over the effects of colonization and for occasionally altering scenes to fit an idealized vision of a vanishing culture, even as the photographs themselves remain an enormous and widely used visual archive of Native American life and dress in that period. Curtis died in poverty, but his archive was rediscovered decades later and is now recognized as one of the most ambitious photographic undertakings in American history.