TY - BOOK
T1 - The gift of the face
T2 - Portraiture and time in Edward S. Curtis’s the North American Indian
AU - Zamir, Shamoon
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2014 The University of North Carolina Press. All rights reserved.
Copyright:
Copyright 2017 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.
PY - 2014/1/1
Y1 - 2014/1/1
N2 - Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian is the most ambitious photographic and ethnographic record of Native American cultures ever produced. Published between 1907 and 1930 as a series of twenty volumes and portfolios, the work contains more than two thousand photographs intended to document the traditional culture of every Native American tribe west of the Mississippi. Many critics have claimed that Curtis’s images present Native peoples as a “vanishing race,” hiding both their engagement with modernity and the history of colonial violence. But in this major reappraisal of Curtis’s work, Shamoon Zamir argues instead that Curtis’s photography engages meaningfully with the crisis of culture and selfhood brought on by the dramatic transformations of Native societies. This crisis is captured profoundly, and with remarkable empathy, in Curtis’s images of the human face. Zamir also contends that we can fully understand this achievement only if we think of Curtis’s Native subjects as coauthors of his project. This radical reassessment is presented as a series of close readings that explore the relationship of aesthetics and ethics in photography. Zamir’s richly illustrated study resituates Curtis’s work in Native American studies and in the histories of photography and visual anthropology.
AB - Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian is the most ambitious photographic and ethnographic record of Native American cultures ever produced. Published between 1907 and 1930 as a series of twenty volumes and portfolios, the work contains more than two thousand photographs intended to document the traditional culture of every Native American tribe west of the Mississippi. Many critics have claimed that Curtis’s images present Native peoples as a “vanishing race,” hiding both their engagement with modernity and the history of colonial violence. But in this major reappraisal of Curtis’s work, Shamoon Zamir argues instead that Curtis’s photography engages meaningfully with the crisis of culture and selfhood brought on by the dramatic transformations of Native societies. This crisis is captured profoundly, and with remarkable empathy, in Curtis’s images of the human face. Zamir also contends that we can fully understand this achievement only if we think of Curtis’s Native subjects as coauthors of his project. This radical reassessment is presented as a series of close readings that explore the relationship of aesthetics and ethics in photography. Zamir’s richly illustrated study resituates Curtis’s work in Native American studies and in the histories of photography and visual anthropology.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85027819951&partnerID=8YFLogxK
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/citedby.url?scp=85027819951&partnerID=8YFLogxK
M3 - Book
AN - SCOPUS:85027819951
SN - 9781469611754
BT - The gift of the face
PB - University of North Carolina Press
ER -