Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952), Son of the Desert, 1904, silver photograph, 13 1⁄8 x 10”. Peterson Family Collection.

Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952), The Three Chiefs, albumen photograph, 11¼ x 15½”. Peterson Family Collection.

THE ARROW
AND THE
POINT
A stunning new exhibition on Edward S. Curtis
reflects on the importance of time and how it can move
both backward and forward within history.
BY JAMES D. BALESTRIERI

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Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952), The Potter - Nampeyo, platinum photograph, 513⁄16 x 77⁄16”. Peterson Family Collection.
P
hotography is a way we remember. “We” is the operative
word. Despite its ubiquity as part of every cellphone, the
camera, a device invented in France in the early 1800s,
was a product of the Western world, of Europe and the
United States. It sprang from a mechanical interest in
science and a revolution—the Industrial Revolution—in the way
humans make things that is endemic to a time, place and people.
Indigenous memory is different. The paths to memory are
different. What is worth remembering and how it is remembered are
different. Different from Western memory and not at all monolithic
from one culture to another. From my perspective, which, by
tradition, is closer to Edward S. Curtis than to the subjects of his
photographs, Curtis is a transcriber, a recorder, a shaper, an artist.
From another perspective, it might be worthwhile to think of Curtis
as a translator and to view his photographs as translations from one
culture and philosophy to another.
Light and Legacy: The Art and Techniques of Edward S. Curtis,
opening on October 19 at Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of
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story. It’s a story told from a Western, European
point of view. Isn’t catching shadows exactly
what a camera does? Take the romance out
of the nickname “Shadow Catcher” describes.
Indigenous peoples the world over painted on
hides, rock walls, pots and faces. Painting is the
earliest record of human creativity. Capturing
likenesses was nothing new. From the first
moments of contact, European artists had been
drawing and painting portraits of Indigenous
peoples. No doubt the camera was a different
device, yet by 1900, when Curtis embarked on
his 30-year labor of love, The North American
Indian, many Indigenous peoples knew the
camera. Curtis wasn’t the first.
But the camera…Let’s think of the word
“Shadow” in “Shadow Catcher” in a different
way. Let’s think of shadow in terms of time
rather than as a visual artifact that pairs with
light in a photographic image. After all, people
have been living by the length, direction, shapes
and depth of shadows since time immemorial.
Shadows are the hands of clocks before clocks.
Curtis was always racing time. Time.
Within Indigenous cultures languages vary;
oral and written traditions vary; faiths vary.
Generalizations are dangerous. I was thinking
about how to talk about this when I read
Felicia Garcia’s essay, “Witness Me,” in the
August/September issue of Native American
Art. Garcia, a member of the Chumash Nation
and a curator of education at the School for
Advanced Research’s Indian Arts Research
Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952), Mosa–Mohave, photogravure. Peterson Family Collection.
the West, offers a unique opportunity to ponder this and many other
questions. The most comprehensive exhibition of Curtis’ work ever
mounted, Light and Legacy features photogravures, original copper
plates, orotones, platinum prints, silver bromides, silver gelatins,
cyanotypes, glass plate negatives and recordings of Native American
music. Viewers will be able to compare the same image in a variety
of processes, side by side. The first part of the exhibition will feature
Edward S. Curtis
at least four portraits, one dwelling, and four to six cultural images (1868-1952),
from each of the first 20 volumes of The North American Indian. The Canyon de Chelly,
second half of the exhibition is devoted to Curtis’ inventiveness in the photogravure. The
Peterson Family
darkroom. Bottles of the minerals he used to develop his prints and a
Collection.
camera of the kind he traveled with will be on display.
I wonder how Native peoples who had been visited by painters
really saw Curtis and his box with the slots and round eye-like
window. The epithet “Shadow Catcher,” given to Curtis by the
Navajo because of his habit of running around looking for the
best light for picture taking and picture making, suggests that they
saw the box as some sort of magic, but I’m skeptical about this
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Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952), An Oasis in the Badlands, 1905, silver bromide border photograph, 5½ x 7¾”. Peterson Family Collection.
Center, writing on Native photographer Cara Romero’s work, says,
“As Native people we exist beyond Western conceptions of time—
connecting with our past, present and future simultaneously. So
many museums stratify Native people based on time—for some
reason the ‘traditional’ is always separated from the ‘contemporary.’
Yet, for many if not most Native people, it is impossible to separate
who we are from who we were or who we hope to become.”
Past and future inherent in the present. Immanent. Western time,
that is, Christian time, is an arrow that moves in one direction. Time for
the Ancient Greek and South Indian cultures has always appeared—
geometrically, in my mind—as a spiral of recurrence. Native time,
as Garcia conceives of it, is a pair of arrows—the past and future—
converging on and disappearing into a single point: an ever-present
present. Today, via quantum science, science fiction and fractal
math, the loop seems to be supplanting the arrow in the Western
imagination. Perhaps a meeting place for all these world views awaits
us. I realize this is a lot of heft for a few sentences in a short essay to
bear, but the idea—a question, really—sheds light on my thesis that
Curtis’ photographs are translations from one system of thought to
another. Bigger minds than mine have certainly gone over this ground.
The subjects in Curtis’ photographs have a popular reputation
for their stern, stoic, contemplative aspects. No smiles. Okay, let’s
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Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952), Medicine Crow, goldtone.
Peterson Family Collection.
play a game. Think of all the painted and photographed portraits you
can. Gilbert Stuart’s George Washington. Grant Wood’s American
Gothic. Think of the countless dark, solemn portraits of forgotten
people by anonymous, itinerant painters. Let them come to mind.
Visualize them, as they say. How many smiles do you see? Not
many. Franz Hals’s merry Dutch figures emerge as a revelation.
Know why the Mona Lisa is the Mona Lisa? That smile, right? Not
just because of its peek-a-boo, ephemeral, now-you-see-it-now-you-
don’t nature. The fact of the smile is, in and of itself, unusual. Curtis
was serious about his art. We know that he was an ardent student of
the painted portrait; we know he wanted to achieve chiaroscuro and
sfumato qualities in his photographs. Did that seriousness rub off on
those who sat for him as he raced to catch his shadows? Could be.
Only later, late, at the end, in Alaska, do you see his subjects smile
more frequently. Perhaps that’s because Curtis, at 59, at the end
of the adventure, was smiling, smiling and in no hurry. He loved
the Alaskan islands because they were unspoiled, as he put it, by
missionaries. He hoped, with a very un-Christian hope, that the sea
would take any proselytizers who dared ply the waters around these
islands to her watery bosom. These Indigenous people of the Arctic
were the very people he had been seeking for 30 years. His joy may
well have eclipsed the solemnity and urgency of his younger days—
perhaps his subjects were more at ease.
There’s more. If you really look back at Curtis’ photographs—
you can see every image in the volumes and portfolios online at
Northwestern University (curtis.library.northwestern.edu) you might
start to count the smiles as they appear on the faces of the girls of
the pueblos, in the kids everywhere, in men and women, young
and old. I am reminded of jazz great Billie Holiday. For as long as
I can remember, it has been assumed that most of her songs were
sad, bluesy, lovelorn and that this sadness sprang from her troubled
life. Not long ago, someone counted her songs, all of them, and
found that well over half were upbeat numbers. Assumptions about
her life and voice shaded our perception of her music. Pivot back
to Curtis. In the shadow of the “vanishing race” myth that inspired
Curtis in the first place, his images translated—and still do, to
some—as stoic resignation and fatalism. Emotionlessness became a
big part of the legacy of his photographs, the same emotionlessness
we see in the Hollywood stereotype of Natives.
It is tempting to see Curtis’ images as time machines, as
windows into a past—he wanted us to see them in exactly this
way and to add the word “tragic” to past—but when you visit the
exhibition and stand in front of any of the photographs, keep this
idea of Native time in mind. Try to step outside the Western arrow
of time and apprehend the eternal “is-ness” of the moment, the
presence of the past, the future in the present, time as a point.
And isn’t this the point? The semiotics of looking at art? The
Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952), Ola—Noatak, 1929,
photographic print. Library of Congress Prints and Photographs
Division, Washington, D.C.
immediacy of the connection that compresses time, however
you think of time, into that flash of congruence between you
and the artwork? When, in an instant, the world and time itself
fall away and nothing exists outside of the energy between you
and the artwork? Look at an Edward Curtis portrait, any portrait,
and consider this: from another point of view, the eyes in the
photograph have always been looking out at yours, and your eyes,
in turn, have always been looking back.
James D. Balestrieri is the proprietor of Balestrieri Fine Arts, specializing
in arts consulting, sales, research and writing. He is currently the writer-in-
residence for the Clark Hulings Foundation, as well as estate and collections
consultant for the Couse Foundation and communications manager for
Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West. He was director of J.N.
Bartfield Galleries for 20 years, worked with Scottsdale Art Auction for 15
years and has written more than 150 essays for various art publications.
LIGHT AND LEGACY:
The Art and Technique of Edward S. Curtis
October 19, 2021-Fall 2023
Western Spirit: Scottsdale’s Museum of the West
3830 N. Marshall Way, Scottsdale, AZ 85251
(480) 686-9539, www.scottsdalemuseumwest.org
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