But it’s clear his sympathies lie with the audacious creator of the arresting images of Chief Joseph of the Nez Perce, the aging Apache Geronimo, Navajo horsemen diminutive against the towering cliffs of the Canyon de Chelly, Hopi maidens with their hair in squash blossom swirls, and some 40,000 more that are his legacy.Ĭurtis’s “impossibly grandiose idea’’ began to take shape. Winner of a National Book Award for “The Worst Hard Time,’’ his book about the Depression-era Dust Bowl, Egan here offers a carefully researched portrait of the man the Indians called the “Shadow Catcher.” Evenhanded and free of conjecture, Egan’s narrative traces the career of the 6-foot-2 mountaineer with the Vandyke beard who was born in 1868 and scrabbled from poverty to prominence in Seattle with his camera, along the way rubbing elbows with scientists, presidents, and titans of commerce, before fading into near oblivion before his death in 1952.Įgan takes a neutral stance toward Curtis’s sometime manipulations of his subjects’ costumes and rituals.
In the process, the charming rogue with the grade school education created the most definitive archive of the American Indian.Timothy Egan brings liveliness and a wealth of detail to his biography of the legendary American photographer Edward Sheriff Curtis. Curtis would amass more than 40,000 photographs and 10,000 audio recordings, and he is credited with making the first narrative documentary film. And the undertaking changed him profoundly, from detached observer to outraged advocate. It took tremendous perseverance - ten years alone to persuade the Hopi to allow him to observe their Snake Dance ceremony. But when he was thirty-two years old, in 1900, he gave it all up to pursue his Great Idea: to capture on film the continent's original inhabitants before the old ways disappeared.Ĭurtis spent the next three decades documenting the stories and rituals of more than eighty North American tribes. He moved in rarefied circles, a friend to presidents, vaudeville stars, leading thinkers. Egan's spirited biography might just bring the recognition that eluded him in life." - The Washington PostĮdward Curtis was charismatic, handsome, a passionate mountaineer, and a famous portrait photographer, the Annie Leibovitz of his time. "A vivid exploration of one man's lifelong obsession with an idea.
New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Timothy Egan reveals the life story of the man determined to preserve a people and culture in Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis. A Winner of the Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction
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