PHOTOPLAY: California filmmaker Anne Makepeace has spent a lot of time of late in Hopi land in Northern Arizona. On her travels she carried what she described as a "big book of photos" and knocked on a lot of doors. In the big book were Edward S. Curtis' photographs of Hopis, taken between 1900 and 1920. Makepeace was trying to match the portraits with remembered names of ancestors. She had wonderful success. "Somebody would say, 'That's my mother!' and pull out an old photo," said Makepeace, who will give a slide lecture Monday evening on Curtis and her Hopi sojourn. "Two women who were in the pictures were still alive. One is in a nursing home in Winslow and her daughter took the picture down to her." Makepeace was doing research for The Shadow Hunter, her movie about Curtis' experiences among the Hopi, along the way organizing an exhibition of Curtis' Hopi photographs and donating the prints to the tribe. The Hopi people she met were genuinely interested in seeing Curtis' works, she said, even though the tribe banned photographs of their ceremonies after Curtis' day. But one picture that Curtis shot inside a kiva, "a real no-no," as Makepeace put it, got a decidedly negative reaction. "I was showing the slide show at elder lunches; it really upset them." Makepeace removed the offending image from her slide show but it raises a larger issue about Curtis: his violation of the sacred space of the kiva is a good example of the kind of practice that has gotten him so vilified in recent years. Though they might not know Curtis' name, even people who are not especially interested in early photography are likely to recognize Curtis' pictures: They're the romantic, sepia-toned portraits of Native Americans pictured gazing nobly into the camera or posed in ceremonial garments, that have remained central to America's mental image of Indians. Curtis started his professional life as a society photographer in Seattle, but he eventually took some 40,000 pictures of Native Americans, part of a massive project he called The North American Indian. Working obsessively over a period of some 30 years, beginning in 1900, Curtis believed he was documenting a "vanishing race," peoples who would soon be extinguished by the 20th century. Though prices for his works keep going up, his reputation among scholars has suffered. "Curtis is recognized as not having been the best ethnographic photographer in the world," said Tim Troy, a research librarian at the Center for Creative Photography who will participate in the discussion after the slide lecture. "A big exposé some years back found him to be a manipulator of his subjects. He did rehearsing and staging, and used wigs and costumes." Curtis and his technicians also doctored up negatives in the darkroom, removing such "modern" objects as clocks and wagons that didn't fit in with Curtis' idea of "Indianness," Troy said. Other critics, including some Native Americans, contend Curtis ought to have documented the degradation and poverty forced upon Native Americans. Instead, Curtis portrayed them nobly, even mythically, in photographs that are unabashedly beautiful. "Curtis has been trashed," Makepeace said bluntly, "but the trashing is anachronistic." Curtis' defenders argue back that a photographer of a different age (Curtis died in 1952 at age 74) is being held to contemporary standards of sensitivity and scholarly accuracy, though, as Troy noted, some of Curtis' contemporaries, including famed anthropologist Franz Boas, criticized Curtis' methods in his own day. And, his proponents point out, while Curtis was asking Native Americans to dress in their traditional clothing and re-enact their ancient rituals, everyone else from missionaries to government agents were doing their level best to exterminate Indian cultures and languages. "Curtis was ahead of his time," Makepeace said. "He had his own vision, and he was trying to go for a truth that was collaborative. He was making beautiful pictures of a culture that was changing. "I know he's been accused of romanticizing his subjects. But he was setting out to create a record of how they had lived, not how they were living then. And his subjects participated, for their own reasons. It varied tribe by tribe, and this is a generalization, but they had a lot of pride in it." For instance, she said, some elderly Kwakiutl, members of a tribe living near Vancouver Island, told an interviewer in the 1970s they had thoroughly enjoyed making a movie with Curtis. For his Kwakiutl Country, the first ethnographic film ever made, they had gotten a great deal of pleasure out of putting on their ancestors' clothing. "With the Hopi, it's hard to tell. When Hopi subjects wore ceremonial clothing on the day it wasn't specified (by traditional ritual) that's problematic. I suspect those participating had already left the old ways behind." The free slide lecture, a program of the Arizona Archaeological and Historical Society, will be given at 7:30 p.m. Monday, January 15, in the DuVal Auditorium, UMC,1501 N. Campbell Ave. Makepeace will be joined by Hartman Lomawaima, associate director of the Arizona State Museum and a consultant for the film project; and two UA photography scholars, Keith McElroy, an art department professor, and Tim Troy. For more information call 327-7235. --Margaret Regan

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