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Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher
Timothy Egan
The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
October 2012
On Sale: October 9, 2012
Featuring: Edward Curtis
352 pages
ISBN: 0618969020
EAN: 9780618969029
Kindle: B006R8PH4I
Hardcover / e-Book
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Non-Fiction Biography
How a lone man’s epic obsession led to one of America’s
greatest cultural treasures: Prizewinning writer Timothy
Egan tells the riveting, cinematic story behind the most
famous photographs in Native American history — and the
driven, brilliant man who made them.
Edward
Curtis was charismatic, handsome, a passionate mountaineer,
and a famous photographer, the Annie Leibovitz of his time.
He moved in rarefied circles, a friend to presidents,
vaudeville stars, leading thinkers. And he was thirty-two
years old in 1900 when he gave it all up to pursue his Great
Idea: to capture on film the continent’s original
inhabitants before the old ways disappeared.
An
Indiana Jones with a camera, Curtis spent the next three
decades traveling from the Havasupai at the bottom of the
Grand Canyon to the Acoma on a high mesa in New Mexico to
the Salish in the rugged Northwest rain forest, documenting
the stories and rituals of more than eighty tribes. It took
tremendous perseverance — ten years alone to persuade the
Hopi to allow him into their Snake Dance ceremony. And the
undertaking changed him profoundly, from detached observer
to outraged advocate. Eventually Curtis took more than
40,000 photographs, preserved 10,000 audio recordings, and
is credited with making the first narrative documentary
film. In the process, the charming rogue with the grade
school education created the most definitive archive of the
American Indian.
His most powerful backer was
Theodore Roosevelt, and his patron was J. P. Morgan. Despite
the friends in high places, he was always broke and often
disparaged as an upstart in pursuit of an impossible dream.
He completed his masterwork in 1930, when he published the
last of the twenty volumes. A nation in the grips of the
Depression ignored it. But today rare Curtis photogravures
bring high prices at auction, and he is hailed as a
visionary. In the end he fulfilled his promise: He made the
Indians live forever.
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