What then is the meaning of this portrait of Princess Angeline? What are the meanings of the portraits of each of the great chiefs and warriors? Each was famous for his devotion to an enterprise that had largely failed or would fail, at least according to the conventional understanding of the almost universally white Western population who consumed Curtis’s photographs in their contemporary moment and for whom the progression and dominance of white civilization was largely an unquestioned certainty.
In John Berger’s landmark text
Ways of Seeing, he observes that “Images were first made to conjure up the appearances of something that was absent. Gradually it became evident that an image could outlast what it represented…”.
1 Berger is speaking here of a history of images that long precedes Curtis’s camera, as many oil paintings in the tradition he identifies initially dealt with religious, mythological or otherwise symbolic themes, picturing events that had not literally taken place. Later it was recognized that a painted canvas would outlast the human body and thus could serve as a kind of testament to or document of the living. In certain ways, Curtis’s photographs, and particularly his portraits, take up a similar task, not only preserving but also conjuring.
Certainly the later part of Berger’s observation, the ability of images to outlast and preserve the human body, was one of the primary drives of The North American Indian project, as Curtis set out to document Native American cultures before they had been entirely wiped out and decimated by violence or were voluntarily and/or forcibly assimilated with white culture—the processes of “vanishing.” Simultaneously, Curtis was in search of a truth or a history that was no longer present, and in some cases, never had been. Edward Curtis has been widely criticized for removing the trappings of modernization in order to make his subjects appear more removed from civilization. This same criticism has also been levied against Curtis’s contemporary anthropologists and media makers including Franz Boas and Robert Flaherty
2 and was probably quite common in that day. More significantly however, Curtis’s project works to construct, or conjure, the history of Native American people that was needed at that moment in time by the dominant cultural forces who needed a means through which to mourn the loss of Native Americans while simultaneously facilitating it. This is certainly not to say that Curtis was not ethical according to the standards of his time and that the work is not highly valuable, both artistically and historically. It is to say however, that the twenty volumes of text and photographs are employed within a rhetoric of history and art and this is one history but not the only history. Once again, in
Ways of Seeing, John Berger remarks on the ways that we come to works of art and their relationship to history:
… When an image is presented as a work of art, the way people look at it is affected by a whole series of learnt assumptions about art. Assumptions concerning:
Beauty
Truth
Genius
Civilization
Form
Status
Taste, etc.
Many of these assumptions no longer accord with the world as it is. … Out of true with the present, these assumptions obscure the past. They mystify rather than clarify. The past is never there waiting to be discovered, to be recognized for exactly what it is. History always constitutes the relation between a present and its past. Consequently fear of the present leads to mystification of the past.3
As you look at the many Native American portraits Edward Curtis photographed and published as part of the North American Indian, I challenge you to consider the histories they tell. The people photographed as “
The Oldest Man in Nootka” and “
Wishham Female Type” fill a particular purpose in the narrative of the master history. They are archetypes signifying the important elements of the project—age, lineage, scientific classification, mortality—but portraits are about individuals, not archetypes. As you spend a few moments with these images in stillness and silence, consider the other quiet histories that begin to creep in and linger, like the afterimage.