The Myth of the Vanishing RaceAdam Clark Vroman, Edward

Curtis & The American Indian

Adam Clark Vroman

Turquois driller (Zuni) [working, Acoma, San Juan, New Mexico [1900]

A Moki potter (Oraibe) [c. 1900]

Kopeli, Snake priest (Walpi) [c. 1900]

Edward Curtis

Ogalala war-party (The North American Indian; v.03 [c. 1907]

Three Horses [c.1905]

The mealing trough—Hopi [c. 1906]

Edward Curtis’s Methods of Photographing American

Indians

• “To Curtis the Indian, as a nation, was ‘the vanishing race,’ whose ancient manners, customs, and traditions should be recorded before they disappeared, and this often led him to pose his subjects so that at times his pictures seem reenactments; indeed he is known to have had his subjects wear the long-obsolete dress of their forefathers for his camera.”

(Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography, New York 1999, p. 136)

• “Curtis paid natives to pose and dance in several simulated ceremonies…He staged the dances out of season. Curtis used ‘not only 'phony' costumes, additions, and poses,’ observed James Faris in Navajo and Photography, ‘but indeed, in some cases actual phony Navajo…’ He removed parasols, suspenders, wagons, the actual traces of modernism and material culture in his pictures of natives.”

Edward Curtis’s Methods of Photographing American

Indians

(Gerald Vizenor, “Edward Curtis: Pictorialist and Ethnographic Adventurist,” Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian, 2000)

What is the difference?

In a Piegan Lodge [c.1910]

Curtis retouched the clock out of the original photograph. The new image (without the clock) was published in his book, The North American Indian.

What are some objects that Vroman included in his photos that Curtis most likely would have left

out?