Edward Sheriff Curtis, The Teton Sious. The Yanktonai. The Assiniboin, 1908
This collection of photographs, titled The North American Indian, was financed by the investment banker J. P. Morgan. Curtis took over 40,000 images for this project that represent over 80 nations. He ultimately published 1,500 of these images in 20 volumes. Curtis’s images are very important to explore in our consideration of photography as both a kind of scientific document and also as an art form.
When looking at a photograph like this one, we must recognize the incorporation of the ethnographer into the scene, whether he positions himself alongside his informants or frames his images in such a way that we are subtly reminded of his presence. The ethnographic photographer is not only a record keeper, but also a creative subject who reveals his photograph’s potential as empirical data, as a taxonomic portrait, or as a scene for cultural context. To some extent, Curtis’s images participate in conventions of self-portraiture even as they attempt to situate these people of a "vanishing race" within a larger context, whether of the land or of ritual and society. One very interesting question to propose here is how photography as a science intersects with art: Curtis has not set out to record the people of an indigenous population, but rather to record their disappearance. This is paradoxical because we see people in most of Curtis’s pictures, but were not asked to look at them as people that are contemporary with us. They belong to a mythic past, and in a way, these photos are a paradoxical visual record of disappearance. This is an important distinction to make from the concept of photographs being used as straightforward records, and what makes it so fascinating is that the ethnographic gaze is also presented as a work of art.
For instance, we see in the photo above that Curtis set up his shot of the scene in a way such that the naked body of the human subject is juxtaposed against a backdrop of nature, creating the effect of integrating this figure into an "untouched" natural wilderness. This photograph transcends the purpose of objective documentation and has the ambition to serve beauty as an image that is pleasurable to look at. How are we to respond when we are asked to take visual pleasure in the disappearance of a people? What does it mean when these highly romanticized ethnographic images are taken despite the subjects being in the midst of a war? When the ethnographer makes the conscious decision to not take photographs of the war but rather craft misleading images of the indigenous people, does that invalidate these photographs as works of science, or is this intersection inevitable?
When looking at a photograph like this one, we must recognize the incorporation of the ethnographer into the scene, whether he positions himself alongside his informants or frames his images in such a way that we are subtly reminded of his presence. The ethnographic photographer is not only a record keeper, but also a creative subject who reveals his photograph’s potential as empirical data, as a taxonomic portrait, or as a scene for cultural context. To some extent, Curtis’s images participate in conventions of self-portraiture even as they attempt to situate these people of a "vanishing race" within a larger context, whether of the land or of ritual and society. One very interesting question to propose here is how photography as a science intersects with art: Curtis has not set out to record the people of an indigenous population, but rather to record their disappearance. This is paradoxical because we see people in most of Curtis’s pictures, but were not asked to look at them as people that are contemporary with us. They belong to a mythic past, and in a way, these photos are a paradoxical visual record of disappearance. This is an important distinction to make from the concept of photographs being used as straightforward records, and what makes it so fascinating is that the ethnographic gaze is also presented as a work of art.
For instance, we see in the photo above that Curtis set up his shot of the scene in a way such that the naked body of the human subject is juxtaposed against a backdrop of nature, creating the effect of integrating this figure into an "untouched" natural wilderness. This photograph transcends the purpose of objective documentation and has the ambition to serve beauty as an image that is pleasurable to look at. How are we to respond when we are asked to take visual pleasure in the disappearance of a people? What does it mean when these highly romanticized ethnographic images are taken despite the subjects being in the midst of a war? When the ethnographer makes the conscious decision to not take photographs of the war but rather craft misleading images of the indigenous people, does that invalidate these photographs as works of science, or is this intersection inevitable?