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Curtis' photographs capture only a part of American Indian life. They
do not show the desperation of Indian people starving after the buffalo were
gone, or when rations promised to them in treaties were not delivered. We do
not see missionaries preaching in the plazas or on the Plains in his
pictures, or medicine men being arrested for performing outlawed ceremonies,
or Indian children being hauled off to boarding schools, or the abuse they
suffered there. Curtis wrote about these things and he lobbied for Indian
Rights, but in his photographs he portrays only the traditional aspects of
Indian life. Why did he choose to frame out the invasion of modern Anglo
culture on Indian reservations? Why did he present us with beautiful,
peaceful images instead of the desperate reality of Indian people's lives at
the turn of the last century? Curtis was a cutting-edge photographer who
was influenced by Alfred Stieglitz and other avant garde photographers in New
York who were trying to establish photography as an art form, like painting.
They considered documentary photography merely mechanical, something anyone
could do with the push of a button. Only an artist could make a picture that
would look like a painting. These photographers used dramatic close-ups,
diffused lighting, soft focus lenses, and abstract backgrounds to make their
images look more like Impressionist paintings than photographs.
 Curtis had used the pictorial style to create romantic images of society
women and children in his Seattle studio, and he brought these same
techniques into the field. He worked with Indian people to set up his
pictures; to remove modern objects so that his photographs showed how people
had lived before white people had come. He asked them to dress in
traditional clothes and composed the photographs like paintings, actively
framing out modern objects or retouching the negatives later to remove
wagons, alarm clocks, metal tools, modern clothes, and in his later work,
cars and motorboats.
Some American Indian people I interviewed objected that the pictures are fake
because they don't show their ancestors in their everyday lives. They argue
that Curtis' many images of Indians riding off into darkness reinforced
white people's belief that indigenous American cultures were doomed to
disappear. Other Indian people argued that their ancestors in the pictures
remembered the old ways and were able to recreate them accurately for
Curtis' camera. They point out that the traditional and the modern coexist
in Indian life now as they did in Curtis' time, and that his images capture
an aspect of their history, which they treasure.
-- Anne Makepeace
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