“Yet in a Primitive Condition”

Abstract

From 1907 to 1930 Edward S. Curtis created The North American Indian, a forty‐volume edition of photogravures and writings that he hoped would cover “every phase of Indian life of all tribes yet in a primitive condition.” All evidence indicates that he set out to make a singular and unified work of art; however, a comparative analysis of photographs made at different moments in the project reveals that The North American Indian is characterized not by stylistic and thematic unity, but by significant shifts in aesthetic and political orientation. This article argues that Curtis’s photographs respond to developments in American modernist art and to shifting depictions of Native Americans by contemporary writers, artists, and Indian activists. Curtis’s work has been identified in the art‐historical literature as a social‐scientific and systematic documentation of a ”vanishing race.” His photographs, however, evade classification simply as ethnographical data by engaging with problematic perceptions of ”vanishing” Native Americans and by indicating an incisive awareness of aesthetic changes in the pictorial arts. Although Curtis’s ambivalent political positions challenge any single reading of the project, he consistently suppressed the plight of the ”real” Indians in the volumes and replaced it with a narrative of Indian‐ness that served the artistic and political needs of an Anglo‐American culture.

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