University Place

Edward Curtis's Native American Photographs

An exhibit like this with the variety of print processes, print mediums, the depth of the work, all the ephemera, the post cards, milk cards correspondence, exhibition like this had probably only been seen 10 times in the last 100 years in the United States. Even Edward Curtis, when he did exhibitions, didn’t show anywhere near the variety of what you’re seeing here. He typically only showed his platinum prints and/or his photo gravures. So, it’s a really exceptional exhibit, and I’m thrilled with my staff back in St. Paul, Minneapolis, who helped put it together and then of course the gang here at the Trout for putting it up.

So, when I think, again, thinking from 30,000 feet as the new saying goes, what do I think about with Curtis? The single thing that to me most coalesces who he was and what he was doing is this quote from 1900. He’s just beginning the project, he’s just gotten the idea of creating a comprehensive permanent record of Native American cultures, Native American people. And he writes to a colleague and friend of his, “It’s such a big dream. I can’t see it all.” And just to begin with what an incredible gift that would be to have a sense of life mission, to have a dream that’s so big you can’t even understand it. And it was very perceptive of him because he really had no idea what he was getting into, the magnitude, the sacrifices, the length of time.

So also as I try and understand this massive body of work that is two and a half million words in the final text, transcriptions of language and music, sound recordings, and of course a lot of photographs. I try to understand that the thing that comes up to me really is beauty, heart and spirit. If I try to tell you what are the three underlying components, key components of Curtis’ work, it’s beauty, heart and spirit, which to me form a legacy, and in this case a sacred legacy.

And here he is. On the left is a self-portrait when Curtis was about 30. And on the right is a photograph of him in British Columbia in front a baleen whale when he was approximately 40, in full field gear. So he obviously was a very handsome man. Most people don’t realize that it was very unusual at the time, he was six feet one, piercing blue eyes, amazing charisma, and amazing willpower. One of the stories I’ll tell you today was when Curtis went to, Curtis became great friends with Teddy Roosevelt. So here you have this man who grew up in abject poverty to age five in Wisconsin, move to Minnesota, abject poverty.

When he was 17 or 18, he moved to the Seattle area. And by the time he was 23 or 4, he had bought half interest in a small struggling photo studio. Seattle, it’s important to understand, was an incredible boom town. Other than San Francisco, there was nothing west of the Rockies that was comparable to Seattle. It was the gateway to the Yukon and we had a gold rush, right? So it was an incredibly wealthy, powerful community. But Curtis established that position there. And he won a photo contest photographing children. Teddy Roosevelt saw this photograph in 1902 or 1903, invited Curtis to come and photograph his family. So within a few years of pulling himself, in the south and his extended family, out of abject poverty, all of a sudden he’s hanging out with the president of the United States. Here’s a young man with a sixth-grade education in a one-room schoolhouse, primarily self-educated, then all of a sudden he’s not only meeting with Teddy Roosevelt but Roosevelt was very enamored of Curtis, so they became great personal friends. So Curtis would literally go out and spend the weekends at the Roosevelt family compound on Oyster Bay at Long Island and hang out with the family and make more photographs of the family. I mean if he did nothing else, that alone to have grown up in abject poverty in rural Wisconsin, Minnesota, and by the time he’s in his very early 30s being great friends with the president of the United States is pretty amazing, but there is much more.

So when he had the big dream that he couldn’t see it all, this was the primary component of it. This is a set of rare books that comprised 20 volumes, 20 portfolios, two and a half million words of finished, edited, significantly edited by a major anthropologist, text, 2,200 photographs, transcriptions of language and music, comparative language studies. So he would compare Navajo and Apache or Cherokee and Absaroak. It is a tour de force. I don’t know of anything like it in history that was ever created. And the fact it was created primarily by one human being with no government existence is really extraordinary. There certainly are some sets of rare books that have been created other places that had significant government support, that were big. But again nothing compares to this in terms of the quality of the work, the beauty of the work. As you can see everything was hand-done. These are all beautiful handmade papers from India, Japan or Holland. Everything was hand printed, all the 2,200 photographs many of which you see on the gallery here today are called photo gravures. The basketry over here is one good example. Those are basically photographic engravings. So there were 2,200 photographic engravings in each of the close to 250 sets that were completed. I mean the numbers again are just staggering.

So Curtis tried to get this going for five years and he realized what an immense project it really was. It’s one thing that you have a vision you can’t see, but when you start actualizing it, you understand how big, how huge, how complicated, how expensive it is. That’s the Morgan quote. So 1905 in December, Curtis, excuse me, Teddy Roosevelt gives Curtis a letter of introduction to meet J.P. Morgan, and Morgan at the time, of course, was one of if not the wealthiest human beings in the world. He was also a major, major art collector and a really major bibliophile. The collection at the Morgan Library, New York today is astounding. So he goes in to meet with Morgan and tells him about his great dream. And Morgan listens very intently and Morgan’s secretary of 25 years is there in the meeting. And Morgan says no, not interested, not going to back you. And for most mere mortals, if J.P. Morgan, in his 18-foot ceiling, wood paneled, oriental carpeted office said, “No,” that was it, you turned on your heels, and walked out the door. Curtis asked Mr. Morgan if he would at least do him the courtesy of looking at the photographs. Morgan had not seen the photographs, yet he just turned the vision. Morgan looked at 10 or 15 of Curtis’ 20 photographs. According to Morgan’s secretary changed his mind for only the second time in 25 years of what was essentially a business decision. So, it was a big deal.

I’m going to show you examples of the different mediums in which Curtis worked. And examples, not the same images, but all these mediums are here in the exhibit between the two floors. This is something called a cyanotype, and virtually no people have seen Curtis cyanotypes. This is something that he did in the field and were typically thrown away. So in my 40 plus years of collecting, I’ve only been able to acquire about 20 of these. They’re particularly near and dear to my heart, because I would bet you dollars to donuts that Curtis handled these prints, the cyanotypes, because this was done in the field perhaps the same day but certainly within a day or two of having made the negative. And this is basically his Polaroid. This was a way he could see what he had in the negative and make a decision whether he needed to reshoot the negative, get the white a little different, the composition a little different. So cyanotype, this would’ve been the first thing Curtis created after the negative.

These are silver prints, so when Curtis was in the field which would typically be for months at a time, he would come back to his studio in Seattle and look at all the cyanotypes and look at the negatives and decide this one we’re going to go further with, we’re going to make more prints and see what we have. That one’s no good and we’re going to throw it aside. So Curtis did somewhere between 40 and 50,000 negatives and edited that down to 2,200. So anything that you see that were in the books and portfolios or anything that you see, really anything here, is highly, highly edited. There were over 10, 15 photographs that were discarded to get down to the ones that you see here or in the book. So this is just a simple untoned silver print. So he looked at the cyanotype, but the cyanotypes don’t have great subtlety oftentimes or detail, whereas the silver prints do. And this would’ve been done as soon as he got back into the studio. Then in terms of prints that he would’ve offered for sale or for exhibition, this is a really important process. It’s called gold toned printing out paper. So it’s photographic paper but it was literally toned with a gold solution and other chemicals to give it that beautiful warm sepia which is the hallmark of essentially all finished Curtis prints.

And this is historically, probably Curtis’ most important photograph. It was done in the summer of 1900 as I mentioned earlier. He had this watershed experience and he had this big dream that was started, this two weeks in the field. Then this is his key image from that time. This is Curtis’ most valuable photograph and certainly one of his most important. Most of you will recognize this is Geronimo. And Geronimo is photographed by Curtis in 1905, the same year Roosevelt wrote the letter of introduction to J.P. Morgan, and this happens to be a platinum print. This is called the border print. So the border that you see around that which today people would do with overmats Curtis actually did in the dark room. He exposed the two borders there to more light after he had exposed the negative and that created those borders an aesthetic decision that he made.

Here is the Kanatika Girl. And this is one, this is a photo gravure, the most common process Curtis worked in. But I like to use it to illustrate what I think is a very, very, very important critical point for Curtis’ work. This work was a co-created body of work. This was not Edward Curtis going out and taking photographs. This was Edward Curtis working with Native people to make beautiful, compelling images. So with this young woman, to me you see a sense of intimacy, authenticity, openness, vulnerability. In today’s parlance, she was very, very present. And Curtis was good enough technician, had good enough vision to be able to capture that and then translate it into a photograph. And that’s another really important thing to think about when you’re looking at Curtis’ or any photographer’s work. Are you looking at the image which could be digital, it could be a platinum print, it could be a photo gravure? Or are you looking at the actual object, the platinum print, the photo gravure? And another thing that’s quite extraordinary about Curtis is he had a gift for making beautiful objects. Some of them are so strong. Well, again, the fact that all of us are here today 112 years after this negative was made still looking at it and generally admiring it and oftentimes we get very moved by it really speaks to the fact that Curtis not only knew how to make great compelling images, but also could make beautiful objects, and it’s what I call objects imbued with spirit because some of them touch people so deeply. We’ve sent exhibitions to 40 countries and we have– Every opening I’ve gone to from Peru to Paris to Sweden to South Africa, I’ve seen people moved to tears. Italy probably more than any place else, but we would expect that of the Italians, right, that they’re going to be very emotional about it.

Again, regardless of age, race, gender, economic status, any criteria I can think of that you’d want to define human beings by, it doesn’t matter, young or old. I’ve seen six and eight-year-old children incredibly moved by this work, and I’ve seen, well, my oldest client is 90 and still collecting. So it is just the universality of his work is one of the things I’m addressing here. It’s because he captured the essence of things. He made many, many very compelling artistic photographs, and that’s another really important thing to understand with Curtis. Was he a photographer or an ethnographer?

He was both very, very clearly. And with his photographic work, it was mostly about creating works of art. He was very clear about this, in the very beginning, the introduction to volume one of that 20 volume, 20 portfolio set of works that we saw in the second or third slide. He says, “I am not creating documents. I am endeavoring to create works of art.” And he is obviously sometimes criticized because people think he either exploited the Native people or he wasn’t ethnographically accurate. And if you’re looking for ethnographic accuracy, you go and look at the two and a half million words of language, transcriptions of language and music, the incredible ethnographic text about the individuals, about their tribal groups, about their life ways, and this immense treasure of information, it is ethnographically right on. He in fact he had to go in front of a blue-ribbon committee at the Smithsonian before Morgan would cut the first check. So Curtis was seriously vetted and that committee was not very positively disposed towards Curtis because here is this guy with this sixth-grade education and he’s getting what seem to people a king’s ransom to do this project, and they weren’t, all these Easterners with the PhDs and they’ve been heads of different committees and different institutions for years. They’re not getting anything and this up start from the Midwest is getting all this money. So it was not an easy audience, and again Curtis passed with flying colors, but that was the written work. The visual work, again, is intended to be artistic work.

Let me come back to this slide. So the important anecdote that this brings to my mind is Isabella Yande, who is a surrealist, a magic realist writer, internationally known, award-winning. She’s been interviewed by the CBC a few years ago, and I have been trying to communicate to people what the difference was with Curtis trying to do things artistically versus factually versus ethnographically with the images. They summed it up so beautifully. The interviewer said to Isabel, excuse me, you’re now an award-inning, magical realist writer. Magical realism has nothing to do with reality as most of us experience or know it, right?

And she said but you were a journalist for 20 years, so that must have been a very hard transition for you to go from journalism, which is all about independently verifiable facts, to magical realism which has nothing to do with the facts. And Yande said, “Yes, uh-huh.” And Keroloff thought about, the interviewer thought about for a moment and said, that’s almost like you’re trying to tell people a deeper truth than the facts would allow you. So it’s like poetry, it’s like any great art. So I’m showing you this, the original, one of the Kanatika girl. This is a finished print. This is how Curtis decided to interpret and present his negative. This was the same negative before Curtis did any of his magic to it. It’s cropped differently, it’s black and white. It’s a lovely image, but in my opinion it does not sing. It’s not something that would be etched in your memory.

And then we go to this. So you see in the lower left-hand side, the unedited or unchanged. You see on the lower right Curtis’ finished print, and then you see to other negatives that he would’ve created in that same session on that same day. And this is very typical of him. He would find something that he knew was interesting. He was working with a 60-pound camera and tripod. It had a black cloth, and he could only see the ground glass which took the image upside down and reversed it left to right. And he had to be able to visualize what the finished image would look like while he’s under a black cloth, what this image could look like, I should say when you reversed it, turned it upside down, and then did all the other things he did. So it’s really quite extraordinary.

Curtis also did a very small body of work which I just call experimental work. He took a photograph. You can see on the left-hand side of the image, there’s some pencil marks. You can also see them a couple of other places in the image. So Curtis would outline the image. He would project it on to canvas or paper, trace some of the outline, and then take it down and then paint different chemistry and different colors that would then get exposed. And very, very small body of work. I’ve only been able to find 10 or 12 of these in four decades. Here’s another piece of experimental work. And then in the volumes and portfolios, not only was he creating these books that today cost $35 million to create. Again, I mean, it’s just staggering the complexity and the commitment that it took to create this. Most people would’ve been very happy if they could do all that and create sepia colored photo gravures. Curtis decided he wanted to do hand-colored photo gravures as well. So in the engraving company in Boston that did all the printing for him, someone was there hand coloring. I haven’t actually done the math for a long time. Some of them may be better at this than I am, but 30 some images times 300. 100,000? Who’s good at math here? 30 times 300? A hundred by a hundred? So people hand colored 100,000 prints for this one small part of this project.

And this is a gold tone. This is a process where Curtis realized that by taking, what was intended to be a glass plate negative instead of putting it in the camera, putting it in the enlarger and exposing it to the original negative, he got a glass plate positive, okay? So the imagery had on glass, we all know what, well, they’re generally small but we look at negative looks like. He took that and created a glass plate positive which would be transparent. He would’ve been able to see through it. He then took that glass plate positive and backed it with a gold liquid wash. And as far as I know, it is the most luminescent three-dimensional form of photography that was ever created. Curtis loved them, he was known for them. In fact they were called Curt-tones at the time. So Scott Momaday is a Pulitzer Prize winning Native American author who is quite enamored of Curtis’ work. This is from one of my early books. It’s this essentially quality of this work, the universality of Curtis’ work. It is certainly about Native people.

And it’s about indigenous people worldwide in many respects. But it’s really about everybody. There are aspects of his work there are about everybody, and I think we go back to presence intimacy, connection, being a human being. So now we’re, again, a little more rapidly going to go through and look at some different culture geographic areas. So some of you know Curtis only photographed from the Dakota’s West to the Pacific, and from Northern Mexico to Alaska. All the tribes east of that had to either have been forced to move, exterminated, or their culture is so decimated that there is very little left. And I don’t want to dwell too much on extermination, but it’s a staggering statistic that in 1600s it’s estimated that there were 20 to 25 million Native people living on this continent, hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different tribal groups, so 20 to 25 million. 1900 was a serious scientifically valid census kind of the whole country, 250,000.

Right, so you’re talking about 99% attrition rate. And that’s just physically, we also obviously completely decimated the culture. So what native have been through and the fact that they are still with us, in many cases thriving, is really extraordinary. So now we’re int he Pacific northwest, and again Curtis worked out of Seattle, so this was sort of home territory for him. So most people know Curtis either for his portraits or his landscapes, but he was also a very gifted still life photographer.

This is titled Puget Sound Baskets. This is called Lummi Type. And this was the first Curtis image I had ever seen. I just spent six months living in a very isolated village in Mexico. I saw three Caucasians. I was people who had never seen a Caucasian before, and I was too young and stupid to know what a crazy and sometimes dangerous situation this was. I just kept on doing what I was doing. When I first saw this photograph, it was a day and a half after getting back to the United States from that trip and I was staying with a friend of mine who I had gone through photography school with in Colorado and she was living about 20 miles outside of Albuquerque. And that was my decompression point coming back to the States. I showed her some of my sepia-colored photographs I had done on that village, and she said, “You got to see this guy named Edward Curtis and see his photographs.” So we hopped on the Volkswagen Beetle the next day and drove 20 miles into town. And I can tell you exactly– This was the cover image on the book– I can tell you exactly what shelf it was in, what orientation in the bookshop it was in, where the sunlight was coming from. I mean this is so indelibly etched in my mind and it was such a deeply transformational experience for me.

Okay, more northwest coast imagery. California. And many of us are completely unaware that there were tribal groups living in California. It was actually culturally extremely diverse and rich. There are many, many, many tribes there. Plains and plateau which is west of the Great Plains. And north. Chief Joseph, again, one of the great leaders of the 19th century. Curtis was actually invited to participate in Joseph’s reburial. I believe Curtis was the only non-Native who was invited to do that. Joseph was an incredible human being. And it was his friendship with Joseph and Red Cloud to a lesser degree, with Geronimo, that gave him such incredible access to native populations who were understandably very standoffish and very suspicious of white culture at that point. Classic Curtis image, the Kutenai Duck Hunter. There was a benefit auction for a really wonderful wildlife rehabilitation center in St. Paul that I participated in and donated a print to. And I initially said, oh, let’s do the Kutenai Duck Hunter because it looks like from this present country, it’s actually Southern Alberta. And I talked about the title, Kutanai Duck Hunter. Wildlife rehabilitation? No, no. So we switched to a variant.

I love the sense of mystery. Again, this sense of connection, this sense of presence. This man is clearly very much there. And even today with all the photographs being made, in my opinion is very, very– And all the incredible equipment people have and the amazing studios. It is really, really rare in the entire history of photography that you find people who are connected with the photographer as Curtis’ recipients were. And to me it speaks the fact that these people, the Native people wanted this record preserved as much as Curtis did. And, again, going back to being a collaborative co-creative process. Nez Perce Babe. Assiniboine, which is Southern Alberta. Also I’ve always loved Curtis ephemera.

That’s another thing that’s very, very unusual about this exhibition. There’s a lot of interesting ephemera here. Plate covers, letters, post cards, all aspects of this incredible enterprise that Curtis did. So these are both from the Alaska Harriman Expedition, 1899. Harriman was a contemporary and pretty much an equal of J.P. Morgan in terms of power and wealth. And he invited Curtis and rescued a lost group of mountaineers in 1898 through this chance coincidence, chance happening. Curtis was then invited by some of the members of this expedition to join them, to join them to become the principal photographer for the Harriman Expedition which was one of the great scientific expeditions of the 19th century.

Post cards. Curtis and his company that he created to do this project were incessantly insolvent from the very beginning. Again, Morgan said yes to Mr. Curtis. I’ll give you enough money to back the field research for five years. They thought this would take five years, not 30. I’ll give you the money to do the field research, but you got to figure out the publishing, and that was the really expensive part again. Today’s dollars, $35 million project. So that weight among all the others was left on Curtis’ shoulders. So he was constantly struggling any way he could to raise additional funds, whether it was creating a Hollywood movie which he did, giving lectures, doing exhibitions, whatever he could do to raise money he did, and this is one example. And in the middle that’s Chief Joseph again.

This is one that I’m particularly fond of. It’s a 16 by 20, excuse me, a 12 by 16-inch print that Curtis did not tone for whatever reason. We’ll never know, or sign. Lower left-hand corner you can see the negative number which indicates that this was done in 1904, so an early photograph of a Hopi woman. There’s something ineffable to me about this print. I find it so compelling, so emotional. I can sense the sorrow, but also the pride. It is just one of my favorite photographs and very unusual for Curtis.

As I mentioned Curtis did a Hollywood picture trying to raise money for the project which was a failure. It was critically a success but people didn’t turn out for it. It was also towards the beginning of the First World War. And again if I haven’t mentioned earlier. Curtis was a very gifted multimedia artist. So at this time people are making photographs and they made photographs and they sold prints. Curtis created this exhibition, this multimedia performance, that premiered at Carnegie Hall, sold out Carnegie Hall either two times or three times. He commissioned a full orchestra or 24-piece orchestra, I shouldn’t say full. And the music was done by Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan. So he had a live orchestra. He had two slide projectors. He had a film camera and he was up on stage talking. So it was a real, true multimedia experience. This is something I got very early on that to me a very important part of my collection, and this goes back to that idea of ineffability.

I’ve looked at this for 35 years now. I’ve not gotten tired of it. I have no idea how many times I’ve looked at it. To me this is magic. This was created by a consciousness that I will never begin to understand. I mean I can tell you, I know what some of the symbols mean. I know this was Northwest coast. I know this is a shaman. But what the experience was like, what it really meant, I have no idea and I’m a sucker for things I can’t understand. So, Southwest, this Curtis’ signature piece, the Vanishing Race. This was done in 1904. And this is basically code speak. I do not think that Curtis believed that literally this race was going to vanish, although it wasn’t impossible, again we go back to that statistic of 25 million to 250,000. It was not unthinkable that they would disappear as a race. But, I don’t think Curtis believed that. But, the culture was being decimated, and that’s what Curtis is really interested in doing, was preserving the culture, the beliefs, the records of the individuals.

Another one of my favorite photographs. I’ve seen this reproduced in a magazine from 1905, and then this print that I own. And again there’s a magic about it, the framing is so atypical for Curtis. Instead of seeing the background, seeing where the people or dark background to really focus on the people. You got these two Hopi women with the squash blossom hair sitting on a window sill peering out at Curtis. Pretty fabulous. Another well-known image of Curtis’ called Son of the Desert. This is an image called Hopi Man. This is a platinum print. I think we have a photograph here of it in the exhibit somewhere.

I mentioned before the idea of an object imbued with spirit, and this is one of the best examples I have. I had looked at this for 20 years and 25 years ago I went down in the vault where I keep all this material and brought this out. And as soon as I brought this one out and started looking at it, I had this intense physical sensation in the area of my heart, my heart chakra, in other words. And I didn’t really understand what it was all about. I just knew this is a favorite image of mine. This sort of cool, I have this weird sensation going on but I had no idea what it meant. And then a few weeks later I went down the basement, looked at it again. When I go down to my vault I might look at 30 or 40 or 50 images at a time. I went down the same thing happened with this image. It didn’t happen with any other images. And I’ve worked with a Native American medicine woman for a quarter of a century, and I told her about this and she said, well, of course, Chris. That is touching your heart. It is moving your heart chakra, and that is why you physically can feel what normally we might only understand. And, again, so this to me is an object imbued with spirit. Curtis got the image so right. He got the print so right, it’s so beautifully done that it’s like– As a very, very famous photo critic said to me when looking at this– It’s like you’re there at the moment of its creation.

That’s how beautifully he translated his experience of that. The image on the left is called Vash Gon. That is a platinum print. This is obviously one of Curtis’ favorite photographs because he did it as a platinum print, a photo gravure, a silver print, a hand colored print. And then as you can see on the right, it’s also done as a sculpture. This is actually the plaster master to create a bronze bas-relief. And I had only seen the bronze bas-relief once in Curtis’ grandson’s home in the Puget Sound area. And so, a year and a half ago my sister who watches the Internet for me to find interesting, especially unusual things, called me one day and said, “There’s this thing going up on eBay and I have no idea what it was and the seller doesn’t have any idea what it is.”

And it’s some sort of plaster thing. And I said, okay, send me photo. I said, okay, that’s Vash Gon. And that looks like it could be the model, the original model for the bronze template that has survived in Curtis’ grandson’s home. And so I had Julie, my sister email him back and forth several times to try and get more information. And I think it was being listed at $54 and 50 cents. (audience chuckling) And I expected that if it was what I thought it was, I expected that there’d be many, many, many people bidding on it and I’ve had times at different auctions where I’ve gone, “Oh, this will sell for $500”, that sells for $5,000. So if it’s something you really want, you have to really be clear and prepared about what you’re willing to pay for ’cause you just don’t know what’s going to happen. So we went back and forth and finally said, could you get the owner to get on the phone with me because I can’t understand what this is, and he’s not giving us enough information. And she called him and said, “Yeah, he’ll talk to you tomorrow at 2 p.m.” I said great, so I called him up and he’s a really nice man, but he really couldn’t tell me much about it. And I said, well, how big is it? It’s about 14 by 20 inches. It’s really heavy. And I said, well, where and when did you get it? And he said, I have no idea where we got it. My wife and I are pickers, so we go out to garage sales, estate sales, and find stuff and then resell it to someone else. He said, so, we got it about 25 years ago and we put it in our basement. And because it’s so heavy, we didn’t know what it was, we didn’t want to move it so things got piled in front of it and piled in front it and piled in front it. And he said we’re moving in two months.

So we’re having to get rid of a lot of a stuff and that’s how we even discovered we had this thing. And I said, okay, well, so that was a good sign, I thought. And then– It’s hard to see, but in the lower left-hand corner– It says modeled by Alfred Lens after Curtis photograph 1909 which is the year of Vash Gon photograph was made. It’s exactly what’s in the bronze in his grandson’s home. So I’m thinking, you know, this is probably the real deal. So then my conundrum was, okay, I think it’s the real deal. And if it’s the real deal, I don’t have anything like this in my entire 4 or 5,000 object collection. What am I willing to pay for it? So I struggled and I lost sleep that night and I finally came up with a number. I don’t even remember what it was. And Julie was bidding for me. And so the next day at 12:07 or whatever it went off. And so Julie called me at 12:08 and said, “We got it.” I said, great, what do we have to pay for it? “$54 and 50 cents.”
(audience laughing)

And it graces a very prominent place in my living room at this point. So here’s a border print of Vash Gon. This is Hopi Man. And again this is another– If someone tries to tell me that Curtis manipulated the Native people in to doing what he wanted done, this guy is not going to take directions from anybody as many of the other people he photographed. Navajo Medicine Man. Again that sense of ineffability of a consciousness that created this and is performing this that I will never understand. Beautiful still life. Hopi Snake Priest. A Hopi boy awaiting the return of the snake dancers. This print is very unusual for Curtis, as you probably noticed. Almost all of Curtis’ portraits have a dark background, and it’s like the image the human being is coming out of an unknown background. In this case very different. This is a Taos man.

This is perhaps Curtis’ most well-known image. This is Canyon De Chelly. And Curtis spent three days here trying to get the photograph that would convey what he felt. And he tried it with three horseback riders, five horseback riders. I don’t know if he went to eight, nine and 10, but he ended up with these seven and the dog. And those are thousand-foot cliffs behind these riders. And to me it so beautifully exemplifies man’s insignificance relative to nature. I think that’s one of the reasons most people find it so compelling. Hopi women with the squash blossom hair. They’re up on the house top overlooking the central plaza where a ceremony is being performed. Great Plains. Bear’s Belly. And again there’s a beautiful biography, biographical information on Bear’s Belly that talks about when he was born, where he was born. To become a man his– I had to drink a six pack of beer, I don’t remember what else was my rite of passage to become a man– He had to go kill a bear with his bare hands and a knife. And when he went to do it, the bear had two friends. He killed all three bears single handedly with a knife.

Red Cloud, again, one of the really great, great tribal leaders, and great leaders. So this is, again, as a collector, this is the kind of thing that I absolutely love. I’ve only seen two reproductions of this. I’ve never seen another original print of this image. I got it 20 or 25 years ago. And I’d had it for a while and then I went to an auction, similar kind of thing. There’s a guy with a white collar and a bow tie who’s an investment banker. And I’ve been bidding against them on something the day before. I mean I wasn’t even close. And he came in to the other auction house the next day, and I really, really wanted this. And he was there and I thought, okay, I’m going to be blown out of the water. He left before this came up for bidding. So I had the other one from 20, 25 years ago and this came up at auction about 10 years ago, and I really wanted this one also. And I ended up getting it. Again it was one of these things where I don’t remember what the opening bid was but it wasn’t insignificant. But I put my paddle up. Nothing else happened. Hammer down. Paddle number 162, it’s yours. And I was absolutely elated. And my assistant who had been with me for seven or eight years at that point had the catalog at home and I said I got lot 57. I’m so happy. I’ve never seen anything quite like it. She said, well, Chris,
(laughing) you have the same man in another photograph that was taken the same day. So again, as a collector to have a photograph that is super, super rare, that’s never been reproduced in the books or anything, and then to have full frontal portrait and the profile, it’s just, okay. I was blessed.

Piegan Dandy, great photograph of Curtis’. Curtis did not photograph– About 30% or 35% of Curtis’ photographs are women. And that’s because it’s typical with indigenous societies, they’re certainly as active as men, probably more so, but they don’t interact with the outside world as much as men would. So Curtis’ photographs of women are somewhat rare, and his photographs in winter are very scarce because he was out with a 60-pound camera and tripod, fairly primitive materials. And just the coldness and dealing with the elements made it very difficult to photograph in the winter. This is a little triptych from the Black Hills.

This is a Peigan image called the Travois. The Travois, those are teepee– Tent poles that you see the horses moving all their earthly possessions on. Which is sort of extraordinary that every season they would have to move all their earthly possessions and go to a better climate. And Scott Momaday, who we saw quote from earlier on about the ineffability, about the essential qualities of Curtis’ photographs, talked about when he first saw this image he’d never seen it before. He saw it as a reproduction in a store, gallery, and he was moved to tears and he didn’t understand why this image moved him so deeply. And he, doing a little bit of research, discovered these were his people. This was his tribal group.

This is Horse Capture. Horse Capture’s grandson George Horse Capture who became a really noted, esteemed Native American scholar and was the first curator of the National Museum of the American Indian. When he was in his 40s, he was very dejected, very unhappy, a pretty profound alcoholic. And someone told him that there was a photograph of his great grandfather in these Curtis’ books. And he discovered that there was a set. And he lived, George in lived in Montana and he discovered that there was a complete set at Gonzaga University. So he reached out to one of the brothers there who said, certainly come in and take a look and I’ll show you the original photograph. He came in and looked at it. And I can’t tell you this was the only thing or the single most important thing that his life changed. He then saw this photograph of his great grandfather, read his history, read about one incredible human being he was, all his exploits, his personal integrity. And then he went to University of Indiana Bloomington where they have some of the sound recordings that Curtis made, and he heard two or three sacred private family songs.

And that changed his life. So he went from being a dejected alcoholic, to becoming a great, noted esteemed Native American scholar. So that’s pretty much it for the Curtis. So really quickly what I’m doing, why I continue to do this after 45 years when most people probably would’ve gotten bored, is this is all about bringing this work to the world at this point. My little company and I are doing all kinds of things including a 10,000-print repatriation of images. So, with Horse Capture’s family, we’ve sent six or eight images back to them, Red Cloud’s family, individuals who may be more prominent but we’re able to identify and we’re doing this repatriation project.

We’re doing all kinds of things to bring the imagery which is paramount for me and all this cultural information in the forms of reproduction to these books back to Native people. And this is one of my favorite examples. This is Art Seater whose great grandfather– You can see photographed there in a Curtis photograph with the wonderful top knot. And if I had enough hair left I’d probably be tempted to do the same thing.

And I was giving a talk in Seattle two years ago. And a friend of mine said, well, I’ve got a Native American medicine man friend who would like to come and do a blessing for your talk. I said wonderful. Ask him if he had any ancestors who worked with Curtis. She came back the next day and she said, yeah, he did. His name was Bull Bear. And I said that sounds kind of familiar but I’m not connecting with it. Ask him again, would you? She went back to him and said–actually his name is Bear Bull. That was the first photograph I purchased. The woman was the first photograph I saw. A day later I was in Boulder and found people at the archive, and I purchased that. Okay, it gives me chills thinking that after 42 or 3 years of doing this and floating through time and space, not having idea that Art existed, nor he that I existed, and then being brought together by this work, it was really fabulous. And he’s obviously pretty happy about it. We had a great time with each other, and, yeah, it was great.

We’ve also been doing many more contemporary exhibits. So the exhibit you’re seeing here is purely vintage work. And the vintage work has gotten so expensive and so valuable and so difficult to replace that I’m not actually going to be doing vintage exhibitions past this winter. This show goes to Ohio, to Capital University, and then that’s it for me. I’m 70, I’m going to rest on my laurels for a while and stop doing the vintage exhibitions. They’re just too expensive, too difficult, too time consuming, too much management. But we are doing, trying to do more contemporary exhibits. So this exhibit which was at the library in Minneapolis. This exhibit we had a guest book, and I was really– They had more visitors come to this exhibit than any previous exhibit. More visitors of color, more Native people, come to this exhibit. It was a huge success. I’m going through the guest book. I’m seeing all these really eloquent erudite comments. People from Australia, from Russia, Scandinavia. They’re talking about personal identity, about cultural identity. They’re talking about history and repeating the stakes and how we need to learn from it. I mean, really great, great themes. And I was very moved by them. I think it was almost next to the last thing was someone from Russia. Again, very interesting eloquent comment. And I’m feeling very moved by it all. And then I opened this page.

Yeah. I’m like, okay. However many nights I didn’t get sleep and whatever else over the last 45 years, this is the kind of thing that makes it all worthwhile. So as I mentioned earlier we’ve sent exhibitions to 40 countries. This is Seoul, South Korea. Gold tone like you see up there. I briefly mentioned that we have recreated Curtis’ entire 2,200 photographs, two-and-a-half million word, hand colored prints, transcriptions of language and music. We’ve spent the last four years and 40,000 hours recreating these. And I just work with a foundation, a couple of friends of mine, and then myself, and we just donated 15 complete sets, photographs and a DVD to tribal colleges. And I’m hoping to do more of those as funds become available. I don’t think I ever didn’t appreciate what Curtis did. But if I ever was so stupid to not appreciate the complexity and efforts that he had to go through, boy, I’m a believer now. He even fold out maps in these books. I mean, it’s just amazing.

Occasionally during the question and answer period, people want to know how I ended up in Mexico and how again what my connection to this work was. And this is it, a professor of mine in 1971 asked me to go to Mexico to make the film. The film never happened. I just driven 75 hours after saving money for five months to have enough money to go down and help work on the film. The film I got, I found this door in this little tiny town in the mountains of Oaxaca. Allen comes through it and says, “Oh Chris, I should’ve called or written you. I decided not to make the film.”

And I was a little disappointed but I said, okay, I’ve been promised a log cabin to live in. He said, “Oh, well some other friend showed up.” And I said, okay, how long are they here? “They’re here for another two weeks.” Okay, is there a hotel in town? There is one nine-room hotel run by the most wonderful, three spinster sisters who are just fabulous. And they took me in and I spent the next week and a half there. And then I came back and I said, well, what else can I do? So, Allen, I’m here, I’m planning on being here for months and I’ve got my 10-year-old Volkswagen Beetle and all my camera equipment, what am I going to do? He said, “I know there’s this village about 60 miles from here, why don’t you check it out?” So I went up. I spent six months there over the next year. And this is a woman, Otilla and her niece and nephew.

This is an Easter procession. So it was a breathtaking experience, and I had never seen Curtis’ work at this point. So unbeknownst to me I was doing, I was really following his footpaths. So I not only did thousands and thousands of negatives, I sepia toned them which was something I did experimenting with in school before this. I collected material culture, did sound recordings and did film footage. All the things that Curtis– I didn’t do any of it anywhere as deeply or as well as Curtis, but it was the same path. And so that will explain to you when I got to that little bookstore in Albuquerque, months and months later, why I still remember what shelf that book was on. I mean it was like this is what I’ve been doing and here it is. Last slide. This is Curtis just before his death. And to me it’s so poignant.

A woman had written to him in 1951, one year before his death. He was 83, and asked for his autograph. She was an autograph collector. It’s a little hard to read his writing, which was quite shaky at this point. But he made this photograph of himself and then sent it back with his autograph. And when you look at his early works, some of which you’ll see here his early letters, they were all done in really beautiful hand-made paper for a simple one-sided letter. He would take a piece of paper and fold it over, deckled edges, and beautiful envelopes. Everything was done so elegantly and so beautifully, and here’s a simple photograph of him towards the end of his life and the shaky hand writing. But he is reaching out to this woman very kindly. That’s it.
(audience applauding)