EDWARD S. CURTIS
b. 1868Edward Curtis was born on February 16th, 1868 on a farm near Whitewater, Wisconsin. The son of a reverend and civil war veteran, Curtis grew up poor and spent much of his childhood living a subsistence life, working the land, and accompanying his father on sporadic trips to spread Bible verse amongst the surrounding communities. His fascination with photography began early, inspired by a camera lens his father brought home as a keepsake from the American Civil War. At the age of 12, Curtis built his own primitive camera; at the age of 24, he opened a photography studio in the bustling city of Seattle and became an overnight success.
In 1906, at the age of 38, Curtis received funding from J.P. Morgan and embarked on one of the most ambitious projects in the history of photography. This project took 20 years and cost an estimated US $1.4M to complete. Shortly after he finished, Curtis suffered a nervous breakdown and spent the remainder of his life in Los Angeles living with his daughter Beth at the dawn of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Curtis died in near obscurity, with no possessions save for a single copy of his monumental life’s work The North American Indian. His twenty volume magnum opus recorded in both word and picture the last living traditions of all 80 indigenous American tribes remaining in North America.
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