TIM GREYHAVENS

Edward S. Curtis

Edward Sherriff Curtis (February 19, 1868 – October 19, 1952) was an American photographer and ethnologist whose work primarily focused on the Native Peoples of the western United States and Canada. Sometimes referred to as the "Shadow Catcher", Curtis traveled the United States to document and record their ways of life through photography and extensive anthropological studies.

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Born in Wisconsin, Curtis moved with his father to the Puget Sound area of what was then Washington Territory in the fall of 1887. His father died about eight months later, just three days after his mother and siblings joined them. Edward had no more than six years of education, and his only training in photography came from a brief apprenticeship in Minnesota, but in 1891 he mortgaged their homestead and bought a partnership in a Seattle portrait studio. He was just 23 years old, and he soon realized that photography was his life’s calling. He worked with two different partners for several years, then opened his own studio in 1898. He never looked back.

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Curtis took his first photographs of Native People around 1895-1896, not far from the studio he then shared with Thomas Guptill.[i] In these photographs, he was freed from the conventions of his commercial studio portraits and could show the “individuality” of his work. He was so pleased with these images that he began traveling around Puget Sound to photograph other Native Peoples.

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His images became so popular that in 1906, he was given a rare interview with Wall Street financier J. P. Morgan in New York. Morgan agreed to fund Curtis’s project, to be known as The North American Indian (NAI), but with very specific terms: Curtis would receive a total of $75,000 (2026 equivalent: $2.7 million), to be paid over five years at the rate of $15,000 (2026 equivalent: $535) annually.

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