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Photographer Ed Curtis ~ “Shadow Catcher”

Being both a fan of experiencing the beauty of the natural world and capturing its fleeting nature, photographer Edward S. Curtis has been in my viewfinder as of late. A Curtis photo titled The Rush Gatherer, a picture of Kutenai first nations people harvesting reeds, developed on my brother’s fireplace mantle over the Thanksgiving holiday. “Rushes gathered in the shallows of the lakes were dried and strung together into mats, which primarily were used for lodge covers, mattresses, canoe cushions and for a variety of domestic purposes,” reads a caption with the print. The Kutenai are indigenous to the area of North America that is today Montana, Idaho, and British Columbia, the photograph taken on Flathead Lake in Northern Montana The Kutenai usually crafted their canoes of pine bark, but, as illustrated here, occasionally made canoes of fresh elk hides stretched over a framework of fir strips.

Edward Sheriff Curtis was born on a farm in the mid 19th century near White Water, Wisconsin, moving West to Minnesota and later Washington state. In 1895, Curtis met and photographed Princess Angeline 1aka Kickisomlo, the daughter of Chief Sealth of Seattle, in his first portrait of a Native American. After journeying to Alaska and taking an expedition to photograph people of the Blackfoot Confederacy in Montana in the year 1900,  J. P. Morgan provided Curtis with $75,000 to produce a series on Native Americans, 1.500 photographs in 20 volumes.

Curtis’ works entailed capturing the geographic environment, games, music, dances and clothes, rituals and traditions attendant upon the births, marriages and deaths of native people. When he began to photograph the Indians, they had already been herded onto reservations. Wars, undernourishment, diseases like tuberculosis and chicken pox and especially the continual encroachment on their living space had decimated their numbers to less than half the original tribal population.

In order to do justice to his task, he labored in hot and cold weather, in drought conditions and in the snow, over many years and right from the start. As one of his friends remarked, ‘To accomplish it, Curtis has exchanged case, comfort and home life for the hardest kind of work, frequent and long continued separations from family, the weary toil of travel through difficult regions and finally the heartbreaking struggle to win over to his purpose primitive men, to whom ambition, time and money mean nothing, but to whom a dream or a cloud in the sky or a bird flying across the trail in the wrong direction, means much.’

In Shadow Catcher: The Life and Work of Edward S. Curtis, Laurie Lawlor recounts Curtis’ legacy of art and kindness:”Many Native Americans Curtis photographed called him Shadow Catcher. But the images he captured were far more powerful than mere shadows. The men, women, and children in (the book) The North American Indian seem as alive to us today as they did when Curtis took their pictures in the early part of the twentieth century. Curtis respected the Native Americans he encountered and was willing to learn about their culture, religion and way of life. In return the Native Americans respected and trusted him. When judged by the standards of his time, Curtis was far ahead of his contemporaries in sensitivity, tolerance, and openness to Native American cultures and ways of thinking.”