The Gift of the Face
Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian
Shamoon Zamir
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 08/2014
Pages: 352
Subject: Social Science, History, Photography
| University of North Carolina
Print ISBN: 9.78E+12
eBook ISBN: 9781469611761
DESCRIPTION
Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian is the most
ambitious photographic and ethnographic record of Native American
cultures ever produced. Published between 1907 and 1930 as a series
of twenty volumes and portfolios, the work contains more than two
thousand photographs intended to document the traditional culture
of every Native American tribe west of the Mississippi. Many
critics have claimed that Curtis's images present Native peoples as
a "vanishing race," hiding both their engagement with modernity and
the history of colonial violence. But in this major reappraisal of
Curtis's work, Shamoon Zamir argues instead that Curtis's
photography engages meaningfully with the crisis of culture and
selfhood brought on by the dramatic transformations of Native
societies. This crisis is captured profoundly, and with remarkable
empathy, in Curtis's images of the human face. Zamir also contends
that we can fully understand this achievement only if we think of
Curtis's Native subjects as coauthors of his project.
This radical reassessment is presented as a series of close
readings that explore the relationship of aesthetics and ethics in
photography. Zamir's richly illustrated study resituates Curtis's
work in Native American studies and in the histories of photography
and visual anthropology.