![]() He had to make time to sell his “Big Idea” to potential backers. Curtis worked frenetic “sixteen-hour days, seven days a week,” neglecting his wife and family, incurring major debt. He vowed to publish 20 volumes documenting the 80 remaining North American tribes in 1,500 photographs with accompanying ethnographic text - within five years. But it’s clear his sympathies lie with the audacious creator of the arresting images of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, the aging Apache Geronimo, Navajo horsemen diminutive against the towering cliffs of the Canyon de Chelly, Hopi maidens with their hair in squash blossom swirls, and some 40,000 more that are his legacy.Ĭurtis’s “impossibly grandiose idea’’ began to take shape. Winner of a National Book Award for “The Worst Hard Time,’’ his book about the Depression-era Dust Bowl, Egan here offers a carefully researched portrait of the man the Indians called the “Shadow Catcher.” Evenhanded and free of conjecture, Egan’s narrative traces the career of the 6-foot-2 mountaineer with the Vandyke beard who was born in 1868 and scrabbled from poverty to prominence in Seattle with his camera, along the way rubbing elbows with scientists, presidents, and titans of commerce, before fading into near oblivion before his death in 1952.Įgan takes a neutral stance toward Curtis’s sometime manipulations of his subjects’ costumes and rituals. Timothy Egan brings liveliness and a wealth of detail to his biography of the legendary American photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis. ![]()
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