Curtis finished The North American Indian in 1930. It was composed of twenty portfolio volumes, each almost 300 pages long. The twenty portfolios contained a total of over 2,200 photographs (Fowler and Homer, 1972, pp. 14-15). Curtis organized the work by tribe, beginning with the Apache and concluding with a chapter about the Alaskan Eskimos, signifying the completion of the full circle of his journey (Makepeace, 2001, p. 15). For the first photograph in his portfolios, he chose The Vanishing Race-Navaho, 1904 (Image 1), and wrote "Feeling that the picture expresses so much of the thought that inspired the entire work, the author has chosen it as the first of the series" (Lyman, 1982, p. 80). It is an excellent example of how he "changed" his images; the photograph was enhanced in numerous ways:


Image 1. The Vanishing Race-Navaho, 1904

the sticks in the lower right-hand corner were enhanced with a stylus; the shapes of the Indian riders were defined by highlights using a negative retouching pencil; and the aura of light running along the horizon was retouched (Lyman, 1982, p. 80).

Curtis's work soon lapsed into obscurity. The Great Depression made the twenty-volume set, that had been sold by subscription with the purchaser receiving each volume as it was completed, and which had initially cost $3000 or $3850 per set depending on the paper type, and which had risen to $4200 or $4700 by 1925, an item few could afford (Gidley, 1998, p. 110; Lyman, 1982, p. 147). Views about "the vanishing race" were changing, with most holding a stereotypical view of Native Americans, in terms of racial hierarchies and the unavoidable extinction of indigenous people (Berkhofer, 1978, p. 56; Lyman, 1982, p. 125). In the 1960s and 1970s, publishers and the public rediscovered Curtis's work due to interest in his talent for applying aesthetically pleasing mystical attributes in his photography (Lyman, 1982, p. 12). Commentators, Curtis's family, exhibition organizers, and anonymous and semi-anonymous dealers in photographs who promoted this "revival" intended to present the images as a new and sympathetic portrayal of Indian lifeways (Gidley, 1998, p. 11).

The stolid Indians . . . expressing their disbelief in the universe . . . brought home to the malcontents the social and political disruptions of the last century, and symbolized for many the survival of human values in a universe gone mad with materialistic greed (Lyman, 1982, p. 12).

Revivals have continued since then, shifting focus according to who presented the material and whether they presented it in a romanticized or critical fashion (Gidley, 1998, p. 11).

Photographs and Controversy

Photographs have a long and intricate history. In the 1860s, Matthew Brady and others documented the American Civil War with photographic images. Photographs were first used to present legal evidence, as surveillance tools, by police in Paris in 1871. The

photograph furnished proof and, while people acknowledged the distortions, the idea lingered that the "reality" had to be similar to that presented in the photograph (Sontag, 1977, p. 5). The photograph, however, is an interpretation, just as paintings and drawings are, and this idealism was present even in the 1840s and 1850s, the first two decades of photography (Sontag, 1977, pp. 6-7).

During the time Curtis was working, a controversy about whether or not to consider photography an art was in progress (Wells, 1997, pp. 20-24). Curtis contributed an aesthetic eye to all of his pieces (Makepeace, 2001, p. 38), and frequently manipulated the camera. Sometimes he left the camera slightly out of focus to give the photograph an impressionistic feel. Other techniques included removing unwanted detail during retouching, and burning in the sky during development (Lyman, 1982, p. 76).

What has caused so much controversy about Curtis's photographs is the techniques he used of re-enactment, posing, props, and construction of the photographs. The photographs' status as "found objects - unpremeditated slices of the world" makes some view these techniques as deceitful (Sontag, 1977, p. 69). As such, there is much debate about the "validity" of his photographs. Even this is complicated, because the notion of "validity" is contested by Elizabeth Edwards, who states that it is impossible to judge re-enactment from a value judgment such as "fake" (Edwards, 2001, p. 157). Curtis's work represented the assumptions of the dominant culture in the early 1900s (Gidley, 1998, p. 11) and, thus, is not what we today consider "ethnographic." It has also been said that "Curtis trumpeted the need to catch real 'Indianness' quickly before it 'vanished.' But he knew that much of what he thought of as 'Indianness' did not exist, and in that knowledge, his work tended toward deception" [emphasis original] (Lyman, 1982, p. 148). The same critic also contends that "Curtis frequently confused his biases with objective facts" (Lyman, 1982, p. 148). Thus, we encounter a difficulty even deciding the definitions of concepts such as "valid" and "fake."

Cultural anthropologists collect their data through fieldwork. To be a successful ethnographer is to be fully engaged in participant observation and to be objective in making observations. This is seen as a process of becoming part of the culture under study. Only that which happens without initiation of the ethnographer is considered "true" to the culture. Considering this definition of "truth" contextualizes the reasons for the criticisms of Curtis's work by Gidley (1998) and Lyman (1982). Because much of Curtis's photography involved posing or re-enactment, modern scholars see these techniques as contaminating the culture, reifying events through photography that did not happen "naturally."

Photography was used extensively in the context of salvage ethnography, of which Curtis was a part, focusing on recording things not only before they were lost, for much already was, but before the cultural traditions were forgotten so that they could no longer even be re-enacted (Edwards, 2001, p. 158). "The 'authentic' was a central trope in salvage ethnography" (Edwards, 2001, p. 159), which, thus, justified representational practices.