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 Etherton Gallery Showcases The Work Of Photographer Edward S. Curtis. By Margaret Regan
IN THE YEAR 1907, Edward S. Curtis made his famous photograph
"The Vanishing Race." Like most white Americans at the turn of the century, Curtis believed American Indians were on the verge of extinction. It's not hard to understand that misconception. In the last generation of the 19th century, when Curtis was coming of age, the Indians of North America were under violent assault by the United States government. Not only did U.S. soldiers and settlers slaughter Native Americans by the thousands, they effectively terminated traditional ways of life that had been sustained for hundreds of years. Between 1870 and 1883, just for instance, white hunters encouraged by the U.S. government killed some 30 million buffalo on the Great Plains, savagely depriving the Plains Indians of their livelihood and forcing them by default onto reservations.
Out of this enormous amount of Curtis material Etherton Gallery has gleaned Arizona images for this show. (Proprietor Terry Etherton, who deals in historic photos, believes that Curtis' first volume, on the Southwest, remains the best.) The Arizona Tribes is a coherent show of dozens of Curtis works, including formal portraits and images from the field. Navajo, Hopi, Tohono O'odham (formerly Papago), Pima, Apache and Yavapai pose in traditional garments, work their fields, tend children, dance in ceremonies. The show also includes some work by 12 other pioneering Western photographers, including the great explorer/photographers Timothy O'Sullivan and John K. Hillers. While many of the early photographers were documenting geology and land features, nearly all of them at one time or another turned their cameras on the people who occupied the Western lands. Frederick Monsen shot a breathtaking image of a Hopi pueblo in 1905. A fine Ben Wittick picture shows a crowd of white shutterbugs and tourists at a Hopi snake dance as early as 1897; one can see why photographers eventually were banned from many Indian lands. As a nice antidote to this unremitting white gaze, the exhibition offers up Navajo weavings, Hopi kachinas and Apache and Pima baskets, giving the subjects of the photos a chance for a kind of visual response. Curtis' pictures nevertheless dominate the exhibition. He captured Hopi sheepherders up on the mesas ("A Hopi Flock," 1921), documented a "Maternity Belt, Apache," 1907, recorded Pima houses and Hopi ceremonies ("Depositing Snakes in the Circle of Meal," 1906). "Watching the Dancers" is an elegant, almost modernist picture of young Hopi women standing on some stone steps, their dark figures outlined against the sky. Much as his outlook and methodology have come under criticism in recent years, there's no denying Curtis' artistic gifts. Compare, for instance, his portrait of Geronimo with one in the show by J.E. Irwin. Shooting in 1898, Irwin poses Geronimo in a feather headdress more appropriate to the Plains than to the Chiricahuas, and he titillates his audience by putting a rifle in the exiled leader's hands. Curtis' 1907 "Geronimo, Apache," by contrast, is a gorgeous study in lights and shadows, a carefully composed three-quarters profile of the old man's sorrowful, creased face. While Irwin's work lampoons him, Curtis' venerates him. Curtis has been accused of not faithfully recording life as it was actually lived. He apparently sometimes asked people to perform rituals or use props or wear costumes that had already faded into disuse. And some of the visual information he might have conveyed to future generations is obscured by his lighting and soft edges. After all, he was working at a time when the painterly Pictorialism championed by Alfred Stieglitz was the dominant style in photography. The romantic images Curtis composed had no room for squalor or poverty or dislocation.
Through whatever cultural filter we must view Curtis' pictures nowadays, we can still register how wonderful they are, especially his portraits. There's the smiling "Papago Matron" from 1907; "Hastobiga, Navaho Medicine Man," an intense young man photographed in 1904; or "Quhiaka," a middle-aged Mohave man who stares quizzically at Curtis in 1903. Looking at these faces from the past, we see people who are wholly, robustly themselves, undiluted by the photographer's intervention.
The Arizona Tribes: An Exhibition of Vintage Photographs
and Native American Crafts, circa 1870-1930 continues
through Wednesday, July 15, at Etherton Gallery, 135 S. Sixth
Ave. Summer gallery hours are by appointment. For more information
call 624-7370.
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Curtis was working just over a decade after the 1890 massacre
at Wounded Knee, two decades after the defeat of Geronimo and
the Chiricahua Apache, and their deportation to Florida from their
Arizona homeland. Living through this apocalyptic history, Curtis
urgently wanted to record what was left of traditional Indian
culture. A commercial photographer out of Seattle, he took as
his subject all the North American Indian tribes west of the Mississippi.
He roamed the West for 30 years, from Canada to Mexico, visiting
80 different tribes, making primitive motion pictures and photographs
(he's believed to have exposed 40,000 negatives), recording songs
and speech. Bit by bit, in 20 published volumes, he shared his
work in The North American Indian, a copy of which can
be seen in the University of Arizona Special Collections.
But it's unfair to hold Curtis to late 20th-century ethnographic
standards, especially in these post-modern days when we've given
up on the idea that any photographer can be objective or that
any photograph represents untainted reality. More interesting
is the question of why a nation that had launched a genocidal
campaign against a whole people enjoyed seeing the same people
idealized in pictures. Perhaps the photographs of near-mythic
hunter-gathers helped justify the doctrine of manifest destiny:
People could tell themselves that it was inevitable that these
"primitive" people would give way to the brave new world
of industrialization and technology. Nobody's fault: just the
march of progress. And if Indians could be put safely in a mythic
past, the rest of America didn't have to trouble itself about
the continuing injustices that damaged Indian life.
