I’m an English Major at West Chester University, and am currently taking a seminar class on the boundaries of fact and fiction in historical fiction and poetry. We just finished reading Marianne Wiggins’ novel “Shadow Catcher”, a work largely focused on the life and art of Edward S. Curtis, and are now working on our final research assignments based upon the book. What I’m wondering is where you found the information about Clara’s divorce settlement and Edward’s destruction of the glass plates. My paper’s focusing on his private life as opposed to the image he presented to the public (haaaaa pun), and in all my searching I’ve yet to stumble onto anything about his ruining his own materials just so she could not profit from it. If you could tell me where you read/learned that, it would be truly wonderful, because it sounds like such a source is exactly relevant to my work.

Thank you,
- Miranda

I learned all about what he was hired to do by JP Morgan and how he went about living with different tribes to gain trust and therefore have access to certain rituals that they allowed him to photograph.

I went to a gallery in Santa Fe where the owner had several limited editions as well as almost all of the original photogravures found in the basement of the old building in Boston. This is what enabled him to print the limited editions. He even had gained access to “some” of the original paper that JP Morgan had provided Curtis with, but those, of course, were much more expensive.

I have been unable to decide which I want to purchase of the limited editions for some time now, but I find most of his images both haunting as well as hypnotic. There are so many that I can stare at for hours. One of my favorites is also in the grouping above, the lone Indian on horseback.

It troubles me that so many photographers of his time and now do not give him credit for being a “true” photographer like that of Ansel Adams or Stieglitz b/c many of the portraits he did were posed. He used clothing that was from an older time and portrayed his subjects as coming from an earlier time. During the periods of time that he lived with them, they were already wearing modern day clothing.

To me, that is preposterous as his technique and grasp of what it had to have been like is truly captured in his photography. And isnt that what art is about anyway? Emoting? Getting the viewer to feel or react, whether its a positive or negative emotion? I am not an artist, but I know enough about art to make me a little dangerous And what I do know is that Curtis is highly underrated and way too “unknown”.

A friend of mine is a photographer living in San Miguel de Allende now and is a huge fan, and besides you, I have found few that have heard of him (this includes art aficionados as well as photographers). I hope he gets more noticed, but not too much more before I make a few purchases .

Thank you for allowing us to chime in with our opinions! Your art is fantastic and after my Curtis purchase, you are next on my list

Same thing with Darius Kinsey. Many people have seen his iconic shots of Northwest loggers, but don’t know him by name.

just for fun, I correl paintered one of Curtis’s shots a while back:

My uncle was Basil Edwin Clemons who was famous in the 1910′s-1930′s for being the first photographer to photograph Alaska from the air. He then followed a circus sideshow around the country, until returning to Breckinridge, TX in the 30′s to freelance. That entire town became a town because that is what made towns back then. If your town had someone who knew how to take a picture, then your town could market itself, hit the news, and make some money.

Im rambling, but you can check out some info about him here: http://texasgenealogicalhistory.com/id2.html

Thanks for reading all that! Trey inspired me!

-Taylor Mahaffey | Photography

An interesting footnote is that he got in trouble for “doctoring” some of his photos. He wanted to portray the Indians in their natural state… and sometimes, when he took the photos in 1910 and such, there were modern things around. In one photo, there was a “clock”. He removed it (how you remove stuff with stamp/clone before photoshop must be quite difficult) because he thought it took away from the pic. I don’t have a problem with any of that… I don’t want to see clocks in my indian pics either!