LOL, wow, OT seems heated… Funny, just got done reading a paper written by a friend on this topic – the doctoring of photos by Curtis. You don’t have to, there’s always someone writing something wrong somewhere on the internet.
#Stoic coffee break for free
This didn’t come for free it took 30 years of his life, cost him his wife, bankruptcy and a total breakdown. Curtis and his view of the North American Indian may not have been everything that today’s ethnographer or tribe member could wish for, but he was well ahead of his time, a true friend to those he photographed, and he created a valuable set of writing, over 10,000 recordings of songs and voices and more than 40,000 photographs of North American Indians that we wouldn’t have without him. Curtis was the first white person to tell the story of Custer from the side of the Indians who were there–and for his trouble he was vilified by much of the press and sued by Custer’s widow. He strongly supported the return of the Sundance which congress had outlawed and he testified before congress in support of Navajo’s and Hopi’s being allowed to continue to practice their religious rites and ceremonies–which were also under threat. When Curtis talked of the “Vanishing Race” he was talking about American Indian culture being overrun by white culture. It’s not hidden and Curtis didn’t try to find it. When he modified a photo, and there’s only one that we can find, it was to remove a clock. His goal was to photograph the American Indians in the way they were before the white man came.
Curtis not only spent the money to make the photographs, he paid his sitters well. Yes, photography was a serious thing, something you were doing for posterity and something that cost a lot of money to do, not the snapshots of today. Did you click on the families section–the Noatak family is certainly smiling. Really, did you even look at your second link? Indians smiling on several pictures on the first page. Simple but powerful, and showcases the diversity of Indian Country too! So in response to the sad-stoic-angry Indian images of Edward Curtis, we’ve got this awesome video by Sterlin Harjo (the man behind Four Sheets to the Wind and Barking Water) and Ryan RedCorn (the man behind Demockratees and Buffalo Nickel Creative). Natives joke, tease, and laugh more than anyone I know–I often leave Native events with my sides hurting from laughing so much. To anyone who has spent anytime with Indians, you know that the “stoic Indian” stereotype couldn’t be further from the truth. Check out this gallery or this gallery if you don’t believe me. The common theme throughout Edward Curtis’s portraits is stocism. My sister talked about those issues too, but also looked at how contemporary Natives are using the images as a way to have a tangible connection to family and ancestors, and how Native artists are beginning to reclaim the images and use them as a starting point to re-imagine Native photography. It came to light later that he was a fan of doctoring images (erasing signs of “modernity”), providing costumes for his subjects, and trying to make Native peoples fit his notion of Indianess. I argued that his images created a false authenticity from which contemporary Indian artists struggle to break free. Edward Curtis is a bit of a running joke in my family, since both my sister and I focused our senior theses on his photographs.
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