Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated | Mick Gidley

For three decades from the 1890s onwards, Edward S. Curtis took thousands of photographs of Native Americans all over the West. These were published (1907–1930) in twenty volumes of illustrated text and twenty portfolios of photographs; the project was supported by Theodore Roosevelt and funded in part by J. Pierpont Morgan, and spawned exhibitions, postcards, magazine articles, lecture series, a 'musicale', and the very first narrative documentary film. While not necessarily unique, the project was bigger, better funded, and more famous than any of its time, and its images still retain their influence today. Neither a eulogy to Curtis's achievement nor a debunking of it, this book is an honest study of the project as a collective whole: what it was, who was involved, and what it meant.