Photographer Edward S. Curtis was a prolific photographer and recorder of Native American culture. This is a collection of his most moving, cultural portraits.

Edward Curtis was charismatic, handsome, a passionate mountaineer, and a famous photographer, the Annie Leibovitz of his time. He moved in rarefied circles, a friend to presidents, vaudevill stars, leading thinkers. And he was thirty-two years old in 1900 when he gave it all up to pursue his Great Idea: to capture on film the continent's original inhabitants before the old ways disappeared.

Reproduces nearly two hundred photographs of Native Americans taken by Edward Sheriff Curtis in the early 1900s, with essays that discuss aspects of life common to all tribes, including spirituality, ceremony, arts, and daily activities.

Historic Emergence of 100 unpublished Edward S. Curtis photographs and personal journal from Alaska! Join Edward Curtis on his harrowing journey on the Bering Sea in the summer of 1927. His first-hand accounts, as written in his personal journal, bring to life his final field season to complete The North American Indian project. This Alaska voyage is truly an example of the tenacity it took for Curtis to complete his grand opus. Between the towering gale-driven seas breaking over the deck, the blizzard snow conditions, the falling barometers, and the hole in the boat, it is a miracle he and his crew lived to tell this story.Included with Curtis' historic journal are 100 previously unpublished photographs. Occasionally unseen Curtis prints surface, but never 100 at once. Be the first to experience these images and make this book a part of your personal library. "How I managed to keep that log during all the stress is beyond my present understanding, yet on reading it twenty years after it was written, it brought the day by day incidents, locations and storm conditions vividly to mind. Frankly, it's reading gave me the shivers, and I constantly marveled that at any time in my life I had the strength and endurance to do such a season's work." ~ Edward Curtis

Bold, sometimes abrasive, forever passionate, Edward Curtis was the quintessential romantic visionary. Curtis struggled through an impoverished boyhood in Minnesota to become a successful society photographer in Seattle. But he soon moved far beyond weddings and studio portraits to his lifes worka multi-volume photographic and ethnogrpahic work on the vanishing world of the North American Indian. Initially, Teddy Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan backed the ambitious project. But as the work stretched over years, Curtis found himself alone with his vision, struggling to finance himself and his crews. The 20-volume North American Indians, finally completed in 1930, cost Curtis his marriage, his friendships, his home, and his health. By the time he died in 1952, he and his monumental work had lapsed into obscurity. In this richly designed book, Anne Makepeace, creator of an award-winning documentary on Curtiss life, reexamines the lasting impact of his work. Curtiss photographs, once ignored, now serve as a link between the romantic past and contemporary Native American communities, who have used his images to reclaim and resurrect their traditions.