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About the artist

Edward Sheriff Curtis

American

1868–1952

Born in 1868 near Whitewater, Wisconsin, Edward Sheriff Curtis became one of America’s finest photographers and ethnologists. The Curtis family moved to Port Orchard, Washington in 1887. When Curtis was 24, he started working as a studio portrait photographer in Seattle. He also experimented with landscape and mountaineering photographs on extended trips to Washington, Oregon, and Alaska. By 1895, Curtis began photographing Native Americans. He took many pictures of the Alaskan/Yukon Gold Rush of 1897 and was the official expedition photographer on E.H. Harriman’s Alaskan expedition of 1899. It was on this very expedition that Curtis discovered his passion for documenting Native peoples’ ways of life.

Edward S. Curtis devoted the next 30 years photographing and documenting over eighty, tribes west of the Mississippi, from the Mexican border to northern Alaska. His project won support from such prominent and powerful figures as President Theodore Roosevelt and J. Pierpont Morgan. In 1930, he published The North American Indian, consisted of 20 volumes, each containing 75 hand-pressed photogravures and approximately 300 pages of text. Each volume was accompanied by a corresponding portfolio containing at least 36 photogravures.
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