Strolling the streets of downtown Aspen, amid the glitz and the glamour, you stumble across a gallery unlike all the others, one that beckons like a secret passage into the distant past, shrouded with mists of history.
Mysteriously magnetized by a force you do not understand, you cross the threshold and time-travel back to a lost world that can never be recovered.
Here is a band of blanket-wrapped Navajos on horseback riding into the setting sun.
Here is a Nakoaktok woman in a cedar-bark cloak, her face more creviced than a canyon, painting sacred designs on a hand-woven hat.
Here is a brave, pipe raised in offering to the Great Mystery.
The walls in Valley Fine Art are covered with magnificent sepia-toned photographs of North America’s indigenous tribes, many whose names are already forgotten: Nunivak, Kwakiutl, Spokan, Hidatsa and Apsaroke.
This place is shrine to them all, and in a way, a shrine to the man who captured their images: the revered, and sometimes criticized, photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis.
Born in 1868, Curtis was a Seattle society photographer who ditched a lucrative business and headed into the wilderness, sacrificing family and fortune for his obsessive passion: taking pictures of 80 American Indian tribes west of the Mississippi before their traditional ways vanished from this Earth.
Forgotten during his own lifetime, Curtis’ work is experiencing the kind of renaissance that happens only in the art world.
Suddenly, it seems, he is a hot commodity.
His photographs now are found in the homes of people like Denver City Councilman Charlie Brown and Aspen restaurateur Casey Coffman, owner of the trendy Taka Sushi restaurant. They’re collected by celebrities and entertainers like George Lucas, Stephen Spielberg and Joe Cocker.
You see his work on the 16th Street Mall in Denver, where a tower of books at Barnes and Noble is stacked with copies of “Sacred Legacy: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian,” with beautiful portraits like the Oglala medicine man, swathed in a robe, shoulders thrown back with pride, holding a long pipe against a backdrop of the Great Plains as they once looked: free of buildings, freeways and suburban sprawl.
The prices for Curtis’ photographs have skyrocketed in recent years. Last fall, Curtis’ work made headlines when it set an unprecedented world auction record: A 20-volume collection of Curtis’ legendary “The North American Indian” series sold for more than $1.4 million.
That same month, the U.S. State Department launched an exhibition of Curtis photographs that will travel from Guatemala and Argentina to Colombia, Peru, Venezuela, Paraguay, Nicaragua and Honduras throughout 2006. The show will then travel through Asia and Africa, making it one of the most widely viewed photographic exhibitions in history.
Why Curtis? Why now?
Curtis connoisseurs see no mystery in this renaissance. The public embrace of this particular artist’s work reflects an inchoate yearning for how our predecessors lived generations ago: unencumbered by either speed or technology, deeply connected to the land, rooted in the sacred and the quotidian.
“People in our modern age are looking for things to ground themselves, for things that are spiritually or emotionally touching,” says Christopher Cardozo , the world’s leading expert on Curtis.
“People love history and the American West,” says Jack Lima, co-owner of the Native American Trading Co. in Denver, which has sold Curtis photographs since its inception. “When they buy his vintage photogravures, they can own some history.”
Curtis began his project in 1900, a decade after the Indian wars ended with the massacre of American Indians at Wounded Knee.
Back then, the theme of the vanishing race was popular in American art.
“By the late 19 century this perception of the Indian as a tragic primitive on the verge of extinction was widespread in white America,” writes Paul Clee in “Photography and the Making of the American West.” “The general feeling was that it was a shame it had to happen, but there really was no other way.”
Racing against time, Curtis compiled the most comprehensive photo-ethnographic record of North American Indians ever created.
One photo shows a Hopi boy, wistful yet serene, awaiting the arrival of the Snake Dancers. Another depicts a grizzly-bear dancer, lumbering in front of billows of smoke in a secret religious ritual. Yet another shows a Trinidad Yurok man, fishing for smelt in the crash of ocean surf.
Curtis spent 30 years completing a body of work bound into a 20-volume, 20-portfolio set with more than 2,200 photos and about 4,000 pages of ethnographic text. President Theodore Roosevelt heartily endorsed Curtis’ project and introduced Curtis to J.P. Morgan, who partially funded it.
It was popular at the time, but times changed, even during Curtis’ life. At first enthralled, the public quickly lost interest in the photos. Curtis went bankrupt. Creditors received much of his work, and thousands of images were sold at a pittance to a Boston bookstore, where they gathered dust in a basement for decades.
When a clerk discovered the lost cache in the early ’70s, it was like a time capsule unearthed at the perfect moment: a nexus of the environmental movement, the American Indian movement, and all things mystical – especially American Indian spirituality.
Curtis photographed many shamans and medicine people, sometimes at the moment of the cure. There’s an exquisite series of rare images from Navajo ceremonies, with men costumed as deities. The four images – House God, God of Fire, God of Harvest and Female Deity – are haunting in their beauty, masked, feathered and furred.
His pictures are a peek into private moments, a trait that makes them celebrated by some, reviled by others. Some native people believe the photographs Curtis took of sacred ceremonies should be destroyed.
Critics in academia say that Curtis staged some of the photographs. The war party images, for example, were taken years after Indians had been sent to reservations.
Curtis also asked tribal members to don long wigs or traditional clothing, because by the time he started his project many native people had assimilated, cutting their hair and wearing cotton clothing.
Other times he would alter the setting to remove evidence of modern life – like extracting an alarm clock from the tipi of two Piegan men, leaving only traditional accouterments.
To people like Rick Williams of the American Indian College Fund in Denver, this is not of supreme importance. “He saw value in how we were, and committed time, energy and resources to preserve that,” he says.
Williams is the great-great-nephew (in Indian terminology the great-great- grandson) of Red Cloud, the legendary Oglala war chief known as the only Indian to ever win a war against the U.S. government, who was photographed by Curtis in 1905. The photo, taken in profile, evokes dignity, strength and pride at a time when Indians were losing their traditional ways, and being moved onto reservations.
Consider, Williams says, how the eclipse in popularity of Curtis’ work coincided with the introduction of the buffalo nickel in 1913.
“They struck that coin because people in America believed that both the Indian people and the buffalo were going to be extinct,” he says. “Here we are almost 100 years later, and the buffalo nickel is struck again, but guess what’s missing?”
The Indian has been replaced by Thomas Jefferson. And, meanwhile, people are madly buying up Curtis prints. Williams sees a link.
“It seems OK for Indians to exist as historic images,” he says. “There’s value in that. But for Indian people to exist as real people in America, for them to have a place in America that guarantees a future for themselves, is not OK.”
A few weeks ago this became very obvious to him after he read a newspaper editorial suggesting that Jack Abramoff’s plea bargain should trigger an investigation of his highest-profile clients: the gambling tribes.
“In some subtle ways, society is still trying to rub out the Indian,” he says.
Curator Hal Gould held his first Curtis show in the early ’70s, shortly after discovering the work in a Santa Fe gallery. Over the desk in Gould’s office is the Curtis portrait of Red Cloud, a personal favorite.
But back in that 1974 show, he sold just three prints: one to himself and two to his children. A daughter paid $90 with money she earned from babysitting. It’s now worth about $15,000.
“Curtis was the number-one authority on the Indian at the time, even more than anyone at the Smithsonian,” he says. “A group of ethnologists at the Smithsonian reported back that Indians had no religion, but Curtis found they did.”
As these potent images travel the world, and increasingly decorate the walls of some American homes, Rick Williams reminds us of the hidden reality.
“The typical American response to Curtis’ stuff (is interest in) the stoic Indian, the primativeness of the American Indian,” he says.
“But what they don’t see is the willingness, the friendliness and generosity, of the Indian people to welcome him into their communities, and help him stage whatever he wanted to stage, and without any resistance.”
Staff writer Colleen O’Connor can be reached at 303-820-1083 or at coconnor@denverpost.com.
