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The Image Taker

The Selected Stories and Photographs of Edward S. Curtis

review by John Nizalowski

"[T]his book revealed that these images are a vital link to the pre-modern world of the American Indian."

When I was a child in upstate New York, my father owned a folio edition of Edward S. Curtis's photographs. On rainy days, I often climbed the stairs of my parents' two century old house and pulled out the Curtis volume from the hallway bookshelves. Placing it on the floor, I would turn the great pages and become lost in a magical world.
Indian warriors with compelling names like Crazy Thunder, Hollow Horn Bear, and Shot in the Hand would peer at me from sepia toned prints, their faces lined by sun and age. Blanketed women holding intricately decorated pottery, men dancing with live snakes, a shaman shaping a sacred design in sand, all would be offered up in a succession of wonders. Even photographs of everyday activities - a Crow Indian hunter standing on a cliff, Acoma women gathering water from a stone pool, a Zuni woman creating a coiled clay pot - evoked a place of sun, vast spaces, and mystery far away from the rain pouring across the windows, the grey light, the water-soaked locust branches outside the house.
One photograph especially drew me in. Called "Watching the Dancers," it shows a stone stairway leading up a stucco wall. Two young Hopi women sit and two more stand at the top of the wall. Dressed in white blankets and wearing the elaborate hair style of Hopi maidens, all four have their backs to the viewer and study something hidden beyond the structure. With its depiction of desert mysticism, this photograph revealed a powerful realm I wanted to learn more about, and perhaps someday encounter.
All of this wonder and delight returned to me when I opened The Image Taker, a new collection of Edward S. Curtis's photographs and writings edited by Gerald Hausman and Bob Capoun. However, beyond returning me to the sheer inspiration of Curtis's photography, this book revealed that these images are a vital link to the pre-modern world of the American Indian.
In 1898, while hiking on Mt. Rainier, Curtis met two anthropologists, Hart Merriam and George Bird Grinnell, who convinced Curtis of the need to record traditional American Indian culture before it was lost to the corrosive forces of Euro-American occupation. The next year Curtis accompanied Merriam and Grinnell on an expedition to Alaska, where Curtis, already an accomplished photographer, learned how to use photography as a tool for ethnic studies.
After the Alaskan voyage, Curtis set out on a life-long quest to make a thorough photographic record of the American Indians west of the Mississippi, a quest that would prove to be a great burden. He was often short of money, his wife divorced him, and his health was compromised by long months spent in harsh environments. But despite the hardships, by 1930 Curtis completed his monumental task, resulting in the 20 volume series entitled The North American Indian.
While there have been numerous collections of Curtis's work, The Image Taker makes two significant contributions to Curtis's studies.
First, most of the photographs in The Image Taker have either not been reproduced since their appearance in The North American Indian, or they are previously unpublished. So, there are indeed some old favorites in The Image Taker, like the "Tablita Woman Dancer" with her enigmatic smile and mask-like headdress or the classic portrait of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perc�. However, there are many new images to engage even the most avid Curtis collector. For instance, there is the picture taken just before "Watching the Dancers," the image that has intrigued me since childhood. Entitled "On a Housetop," it shows two of the Hopi women on the roof, while two are standing the stone stairway's base. One of the women on the roof has turned her face to the camera. To see this beloved photographic moment extended in time is a sheer joy.
The Imager Taker's other contribution is its rare inclusion of Curtis's renderings of the myths and legends told to him by tribal elders. As editor Gerald Hausman writes, "Today it is impossible to hear the voices that Curtis heard. The best we can do is to read and share what he recorded from people whose memories stretched far back into ancestral time." Curtis also wrote histories of each American Indian tribe he photographed, and several of these are strongly critical of U.S. government policy towards indigenous people.
When Europeans colonized the western hemisphere, the transformation of American Indian culture was inevitable. The value of books like The Image Taker is that they provide a bridge to what was lost. Joe Medicine Crow remembers when Curtis came to Crow territory. He states in his introduction to The Image Taker, "We cannot return to the olden-days, but the wisdom provided by seeing photographs of our old-timers and hearing their stories helps us live in today's fast-paced world. This book provides that wisdom."

John Nizalowski teaches creative writing at Mesa State in Grand Junction, Colo. He is currently working on a biography of Southwestern author Frank Waters.