Photographing the Other: Edward Curtis, Part Two

Photography as Re-Enactment
Part Two
When photographer Edward Curtis began his monumental twenty volume project on the Native
American Tribes of North America, the term documentary photographer, had yet to be invented.
Such was the certainty that a photograph was a document and an irrefutable record of what exists
or what had happened, that in 1907, on the other side of the country, Alfred Stieglitz was in the
midst of a struggle to convince his New York audience that photography could be art. British
director and producer, John Grierson put the worddocumentary to new usein 1926 as a suggestion
for a new kind of movie, and the new word quickly migrated to the field of photography where the
two words became a pair: documentary photography. In writing The First Principles of
Documentary, Grierson wrote,
We believe that the cinemas capacity for getting around, for observing and selecting from life itself
can be exploited in a new and vital art form and We believe that the materials and the stories taken
from the raw can be finer (more real in the philosophic sense) than the acted article. and In
documentary we deal with the actual, and in one sense with the real. But the really real, if I may use
that phrase, is something deeper than that. The only reality which counts in the end is the
interpretation which is profound.
But Grierson also revealed the purpose of the documentary, I look on cinema as a pulpit, and use it
as a propagandist. In fact, the filmmakers concept of a documentary was activist and socially aware.
As he stated,The basic force behind (a documentary) was social and not sthetic. It was a desire to
make a drama out of the ordinary, to set against the prevailing drama of the extraordinary: a desire
to bring the citizens eye in from the ends of the earth to the story, his own story, of what was
happening under his nose. If one agrees with Grierson that the purpose of a documentary was to
raise the consciousness of the viewer, then, clearly, a strong commitment to the content was a
prerequisite, and it would seem that Edward Curtis and his very genuine sense of purpose would
quality as a documentary photographer. Here, it would be helpful to distinguish between
documentary photograph and photojournalism in that photo journalism is necessarily tethered to the
news that which is current and occurring in the moment. Whatever else he might have been, Curtis
was no photojournalist and needs to be thought of as an independent self-educated actor, engaged in
his own obsession. He can, in effect, be thought of as an artist, who constructed a narrative of a
doomed way of life. On one hand, the official government response to the Native American way of
life, that which was still in existence, was repressive, on the other hand, tourists were enthralled
with the alien culture in their midst.

This image of Hopi women grinding corn was directed by Curtis whose request to look at the camera
amused the young women who were used to looking at corn as they were grinding it.
Curtis felt that, if Native American culture were not recorded immediately, it would disappear. And
the best academic minds agreed unanimously that they were witnessing the last of the Indian. None,
not even Curtis, asked why this culture should be wiped away; its extinction was simply accepted. It
was this urgency of acceptance that ironically drove the photographer on his documentary
journey.In her 2005 article, Constructing the World. Documentary Photography in Artistic

Use,Bettina Lockemann reminded her readers of the distinction between authenticity and
representation and she also raises the issue of aesthetics, i.e. beauty and document. Theoretically, in
a document, the maker disappears, style is eschewed and personal approach is elided in the search
for the purity of authenticity, but in practice, the knowledgable and trained eye can easily see the
distinctions, that are quite unique, between documentary photographers, Dorothea Lange and Ben
Shahn and Walker Evans. Authenticity must double back upon and within itself and becomes a
representation. Bur representation presents other problems: who is constructing the representation
and who is being represented? The relation is analogous as that of the One to the Other. As
photohistorian John Tagg asserted in his 1999 essay, Evidence, Truth and Order: A Means of
Surveillance,
Like the state, the camera is never neutral. The representations it produces are highly coded, and
the power it wields is never its own. As a means of record, it arrives on the scene vested with a
particular authority to arrest, picture and transform daily life; a power o see and record; a power of
surveillance that effects a complete reversal of the political axis of representation, which has
confused so many labourist historians. This is not the power of the camera but the power of the
apparatus of the local state which deploy it and guarantee the authority of the images it constructs
to stand as evidence or register a truth.

Taggs analysis of photography in the nineteenth century was a critique from a Foucauldrian point of
view. In 1975, Michel Foucault published the seminal work, Discipline and Punish, in which he
examined the culture of surveillance, which, Tagg argued, shifted to the camera whose baleful eye
came to rest attentively upon certain bodies that need to be docile. These would be the bodies of the
Other, whether the criminal or the mad person or the non-European. Wielding a camera is an act of
privilege and power, a granting of the gift of being able to represent, to not be represented. Tagg
wrote an entire book on what he eloquently termed The Burden of Representation (1988) that surely
informed the later critiques of Edward Curtis, for his Native Americans certainly reenacted the role
of the sentimentalized Other, made safe for public consumption thorough decades of suppression
and surveillance. Now safely relocated on reservations, they would be examined, interrogated and
then represented and explained through the lens of the all-powerful apparatus of construction, the
camera.

Edward Curtis. Dancing to Restore an Eclipsed Moon.

As Martha H. Kennedy explained in her 2001 preface to The Plains Indian Photographs of Edward S.
Curtis, He and many of his contemporaries believed strongly that all Indians were members of a
vanishing race and admired what ere perceived as their heroic qualities as noble savages. Attentive
though he and his assistants were to the differences between the Plains Indians and other native
people, Curtis could not help but be shaped in his photographic approach by these culturally
ingrained perceptions, such as the sweeping generalization that all native peoples were one
homogeneous culture.
Called the Shadow Catcher by Native Americans, although he also used dry plates, Curtis was surely
one of the last major photographers to use wetplate photography, sliding his glass plates in and out
of his large view camera. The images he made are old fashioned, even in their own time, as if he
were deliberately evoking the nostalgic albumen tints that semiotically speak of the past. In fact, in
his book 1998 book,Edward S. Curtis and theNorth American Indian, Incorporated,Mike Gidley

makes the case, and, one tends to agree with him, that Curtis was involved in a vast enterprise of
representation of the Native American, something he termed the beautiful in that vanishing life. It
wasnt until he gathered information for his last volume on the indigenous tribes of Alaska, the
Nunivak, that Curtis found a culture on the isolated Univac Island that had not been altered by
missionaries. What Curtis found in1928 was an untouched world that would be eradicated ten years
later by Swedish missionaries who destroyed the extradorinaiy masks in the name of Christianity
and civilization.

Edward Curtis. Wedding Party. Kwakiutl

Today, we tend to think of Edward Curtis as being caught between different attitudes towards the
Native Americans. For decades his work, The North American Indian (1907-1930), had been
forgotten, but, ironically, during the very years of a long overdue Native American political activism,
his work was rediscovered in 1970 in the bookstore basement by a sales clerk. Subsequently, some
of his photographs were exhibited at the Pierpont Morgan Library and the Philadelphia Museum of
Art, reviving an interest in this nearly forgotten photographer. And this rediscovery happened in a
very unusual social and political context. The year before, two hundred Native Americans seized
Alcatraz in November of 1969 and occupied it for almost two years. After all, they argued, the prison
island was like home, the reservation, the rez,It has no running water; it has inadequate sanitation
facilities; there is no industry, and so unemployment is very great; there are no health care facilities;
the soil is rocky and unproductive. In 1970 author Dee Brown published Bury My Heart at Wounded
Knee, a revisionist version of how the West was won, a book so important that over forty years later
it still informs contemporary thinking about American internal colonialism and imperialism. Indeed
in 1973, two hundred Native Americans seized the town of Wounded Knee to call attention to the
plight of tribes trapped on reservations and to the difficulties faced by so-called urban tribal
members who faced constant discrimination. Therefore a contemporary understanding of Edward
Curtis was unfolding during a period of intense social and political activism within the Native
American communities themselves.

Edward Curtis. Before the Storm

Writing for theAmerican Mastersseries for PBS, George Horse Capture was sympathetic to Curtis
and praised his work, but, among other observers, the posthumous reputation of Edward Curtis has
suffered at the hands of his many critics. In a well-known article, Socioacupuncture: Mythic
Reversals and the Striptease in Four Scenes, a member of the Chippewa author, Gerald Vizenor, one
of the most severe critics of Curtis and his methods, described the representational clothing of the
Native Americans pictured by Curtis as a kind of reverse striptease,
Tribal cultures are colonized in a reversal of the striptease. Familiar tribal images are patches on the
pretense of fear, and there is a sense of delicious terror in he structural oppression of savagism and
civilization fund in the cinema and in the literature of romantic captivities. Plains teepees, and the
signs of moccasins, canoes, feathers, leathers, arrowheads, numerous museum artifacts, conjure the
cultural rituals of the traditional tribal past, but the pleasures of the tribal striptease are denied,
data-bound, stopped in emulsion, colonized in print to resolve the insecurities and inhibitions of the
dominant culture..Edward Curtis possessed romantic anduninvited images of tribal people in his
photographs. Posed and decorated in traditional vestments and costumes, his pictorial tribes are
secular reversals of a ritual striptease, frozen faces on acalendar of arrogant discoveries, a solemn

ethnocentric appeal for recognition of his own insecurities; hisretouch emulsion images are basedon
the pretense of fear..Tribal cultures have been transformed inphotographic images from mythic time
intomuseum commodities.
As Mike Gidley noted, Vizenor spoke in a collective persona, the collective we of the North American
Indians, when he said, ..we were caught dead in camera time, extinct in photographs, and now in
search of our pst and common memories we walk right back into these photographs.The problem for
these kinds of critiques is that they tend to assume that the Native Americans themselves had no
agency. Many times, Curtis respectfully asked permission to photograph individuals and to record
religious ceremonies considered both sacred and secret. When permission was granted, the effect
was that Curtis was actively joining the tribes in their defiant attempts to preserve their own rituals.
If and when one views the archive or collection of Curtis as a joint effort between the actors and the
playwright, then the interpretation shifts from that of surveillance to cooperation. Curtis, who got
his start as an ethnographer photographing the indigenous peoples of Alaska, was trusted by the
Plains Indians and the tribes of the Pueblos.
President Theodore Roosevelt, who was in charge of the government that was working so
assiduously to erase the past lives of the Native Americans mourned the passing of the distinctive
culture, embodying the odd duality of white Americans at this time in his support of Curtis. The very
language employed by Curtis was the language of painting, soft-focus and romantic and nostalgic,
the harsh glitter of a mechanized document gentled in the development process into a suitable
vehicle for what he called the old-time Indian. In an odd twist of fate, as recounted in the lovely film
by Anne Makepeace, Coming to Light: Edward S. Curtis, contemporary members of the tribes visited
by the photographer a century ago today look to his images for information of their now-lost
cultures. It seems to matter little that there were slights of hand involved, the removal of elements
of modern life in the darkroom, and the fact that when Curtis was on the reservations, missionaries
and Indian Agents were in charge, and the traditional clothing of the Native Americans were, even
then, regarded as costumes. What is important to contemporary Native Americans is that this work
by Curtis is all they have left of their past lives.

Edward Curtis.Piegan Encampment

The importance of native agency and participation become even more apparent in Curtisfilm on the
Kwakiutl culture of Vancouver. This overly dramatic and often fictional movie would not have been
possible if the tribes people had not carefully recreated their own traditional crafts, clothing, and
rituals, including a recreation of a banned and illegal potlatch ceremony. This money-making
enterprise was anything but accurate, and antics, such as renting a dead whale for a culture that
never hunted whales, marred the supposed ethnographic nature of the work. Although In the Land
of Head Hunters (1915) was a forced narrative, it is clear that the Kwakiutl who took part enjoyed
playing their roles, however dramatized by the stern director. It is no accident that when Curtistook
a break fromhis project on the vanishing Native Americans, he went to Hollywood and even worked
with C. B. DeMille. Curtis doggedly pursued his dream until he published his final volume in 1930,
exhausted and totally without money and largely unappreciated. Despite the critiques of his
methodology and the evidence of a imperialist mind which leaves its traces on his photographs, what
is important now is that enough truth and authenticity was captured, if only in the intent of the
maker, and that the images of Edward Curtis exist today and hybrid concoctionsworks of art and
works of representation and historical documents.
If you have found this material useful, please give credit to

Dr. Jeanne S. M. Willette andArt History Unstuffed. Thank you.

[emailprotected]
http://www.arthistoryunstuffed.com/photogr
aphing-the-other-edward-curtis/