Native American History Edward S. Curtis Painting Poles Cheyenne Photogravure 1910

Edward Curtis

Photograph

Curtis, Edward S. Painting Poles—Cheyenne, 1910, records Cheyenne ceremonial activity during Curtis’s long photographic and ethnographic project The North American Indian. The image belongs to his extensive documentation of Indigenous peoples of the American West, undertaken during a period when federal assimilation policies, reservation confinement, and suppression of Native religious practices had already altered many aspects of tribal life. Curtis’s photographs preserve visual evidence of specific ceremonies, clothing, structures, and individuals, while also requiring consideration of his own editorial choices and his stated aim of recording what he regarded as traditional Native life.

Photogravure with image measuring 7-3/8" x 5-1/2", mounted to an overall size of 14" x 16". Title, date, and Curtis’s copyright are printed below the image. The composition depicts the Cheyenne activity identified by Curtis as “Painting Poles,” placing the photograph within a sequence of images he made concerning Cheyenne ceremonial practices. Curtis began working as a portrait photographer in Seattle in the 1890s and later secured financial backing from J. Pierpont Morgan for The North American Indian. Published between 1907 and 1930, the project ultimately comprised twenty text volumes accompanied by twenty portfolios of photogravures; Theodore Roosevelt contributed the foreword.

Curtis worked with approximately eighty Indigenous communities while producing The North American Indian, combining photographs with recorded narratives, vocabularies, songs, and ethnographic observations. His Cheyenne photographs form part of that broader effort and retain particular documentary value when read against the federal policies that restricted Indigenous cultural and religious practices during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Very good condition. A 1910 Curtis photogravure preserving a specifically identified Cheyenne ceremonial activity within one of the most extensive photographic projects devoted to Native peoples of the American West.

Item #14207

Price: $220.00