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Curtis went to Alaska thrilled with the prospect of making pictures in such a grand landscape. On the trip, he captured thousands of images, working with the cumbersome equipment of the day. He went to great lengths to get his pictures; at one time, he nearly capsized in a small boat that floated too near a calving glacier. He took over 5000 photographs on the expedition.
Curtis came to Alaska with preconceptions about Native Americans that were typical of his time, but on the trip he was much influenced by George Bird Grinnell, a man who had spent years among the tribes of the American West. Curtis realized that Native peoples in North America were changing, even vanishing. He decided that he had a tiny window of time to create a permanent record of a people who had yet to face the juggernaut of Western Civilization.
When the trip was over, Curtis
used the connections he'd made to seek patrons for further
photographic studies of Native peoples. The millionaire J.
P. Morgan sponsored Curtis's monumental twenty volume work,
The North American Indian. But the fashion for Indian
photographs faded even before the books were published and
Curtis began a decline into obscurity. Plagued by debts and
poor health, he continued to document the lives of Indians.
For a time, he supported himself by filming and
photographing in Hollywood, but with little success. After
his death in 1952, much of his work gathered dust in
archives and attics; the few pieces exhibited were derided
for their manipulated images and overly romantic views. More
recently, though, his work has been re-evaluated, and it is
in demand again. The rare surviving sets of The North
American Indian sell for well over $100,000.
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For information on the Harriman Retraced Expedition e-mail: harriman2001@science.smith.edu |