Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian, Incorporated

A study of the literary influence of Edward Curtis's multi-volume collections of Native American photographs.

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.

Part I. Introductory: 1. A national undertaking; Part II. Co-ordinates for a Project: 2. Cracker Jack pictures; 3. Trading with the Indians; 4. Hustling the eminent; 5. Diffident ethnology; Part III. Indians Incorporated: 6. Adventure in the field; 7. 'The vanishing race' in sight and sound; 8. Bronze in action; 9. Representing the Indian.

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. This book is the first full length study of this extremely influential project.

Mick Gidley is Emeritus Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds. He has been awarded fellowships by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Netherlands Institute for Advanced Study and the UK's Arts and Humanities Research Council. In 2007 he was awarded the Arthur Miller Prize for an essay on Richard Avedon published in the final issue of the annual Prospects (Cambridge University Press, 2006), and in 2009 he was made a lifetime Honorary Fellow of the British Association for American Studies. His books include With One Sky Above Us: Life on an Indian Reservation at the Turn of the Century (1979 and 1985), Kopet: A Documentary Narrative of Chief Joseph's Last Years (1981 and 1983) and Photography and the USA (2011). As well as many essays on literary and cultural history, he has edited or co-edited such works as Views of American Landscapes (Cambridge University Press, 1989 and 2007), Modern American Culture: An Introduction (1992 and 1995), American Photographs in Europe (1994), Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian Project in the Field (2003 and 2010) and Writing with Light: Words and Photographs in American Texts (2010). He is currently completing E. O. Hoppé at Large: Photographing the Modern World.