Performing Archive Main Menu Visualizing the “Vanishing Race”: the photogravures of Edward S. Curtis Front Page for Visualizing the "Vanishing Race" path Curtis' Image and Life: The Network of The North American Indian, Inc. An experiment with data visualization approach to understand and contextualize Curtis' images and his life Media, Technology and Mediations Curtis's Technology, Relationships to Media and Style Contextualizing Curtis, The North American Indian, and Race the collection of essays from the contributors Consulting with Tribes as Part of Archive Development Introduction to Consulting with Tribes by Ulia Gosart Contributing Archives Information on how to participate in Performing Archive Browsing the Media A path of paths that allow users to cut through the collection in a variety of ways. Acknowledgements and Project Information Project Network

Introduction: Media, Technology and Mediations

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This path focuses on the many ways that Edward Curtis interacted with and used media. Throughout his life, Curtis worked at the intersection of a variety of identities. At various moments was a photographer, an artist, an ethnologist, a historian, a biographer, a musicologist, a filmmaker, a linguist and a designer. Each of these identities demanded that he utilize media in slightly different ways. Ethical considerations like the non-interference of a present day scientist or anthropologist were not the same in Curtis's moment, but these ideas were developing at that time and tensions between the desire to create art and the desire to create a scientific and historical document run throughout Curtis's work and writings.

Curtis adopted nearly every type of technology available to him at the time that he was working, from the 1890s into the late 1920s. These technologies included not only a wide range of photographic processes, but newly available audio and visual recording media as well. Curtis worked a very unique moment in time. Had he taken up his work a few decades earlier, he would have been much more limited in the types of documentation he could undertake. 

In the first section of this path, you can explore the different types of technology Curtis used while working on The North American Indian as well as some of his other projects. The second part of the path pauses to consider Curtis's portraiture as a style, both artistically and politically. As this book grows, other sections will be added here, placing additional aspects of Curtis's media and style into focus. 

This page has paths:

  1. Media, Technology and Mediations Erik Loyer

Contents of this path:

  1. Documentary Technologies
  2. Focus on the Portrait: Video Essay
  3. AfterImages