Edward S. Curtis
1868-1952
If there was one photographer who became a master of Native American photographs it was Edward Curtis. Born in 1868, he began taking photographs in 1890 and devoted much of his career to recording traditional American Indian customs and traditions.
Curtis is known for documenting the last of America's tribes from 1906 to 1930 in a gigantic collection called “The North American Indian.” Beginning in 1900 and continuing over the next thirty years, Edward Sheriff Curtis, or the “Shadow Catcher” as he was later called by some of the tribes, took over 40,000 images and recorded rare ethnographic information from over eighty American Indian tribal groups, ranging from the Eskimo or Inuit people of the far north to the Hopi people of the Southwest.
He captured the likeness of many important and well-known Indian people of that era, including Geronimo, Chief Joseph, Red Cloud, Medicine Crow and others. This monumental accomplishment is comprised of more than 2,200 sepia toned photogravures bound in twenty volumes of written information and small images and twenty portfolios of larger artistic representations.
