Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian Project in the Field

Mick Gidley provides an intimate and informative glimpse of photographer Edward S. Curtis (1868–1952) and his associates as they embarked on their epic quest to document through word and picture the traditional cultures of Native Americans in the western United States—cultures that Curtis believed were inevitably doomed.
 
Curtis’s project in the early decades of the twentieth century became the largest anthropological enterprise ever undertaken in this country, yielding the monumental…