Edward S. Curtis devoted three decades to photographing Indigenous peoples across North America, working in regions that extended from the Mojave Desert to the Arctic. From more than 40,000 photographs, a substantial selection was originally organized as The North American Indian: twenty large-format portfolios conceived to preserve cultural knowledge that Curtis believed was disappearing. The resulting images encompass formal portraits, landscapes, dress, ceremonies and communal life.

Edward S. Curtis. The North American Indian. The Complete Portfolios brings all twenty portfolios together in a single publication, supplemented by selected photographs from the accompanying text volumes. Its more than 700 images allow the project to be read not as a succession of isolated, familiar pictures but as an extended photographic structure. Hopi rites, Qagyuhl winter dancers and ceremonies on Nunivak Island appear within a broader geography of peoples, environments and practices.

Curtis’s method was ambitious in both duration and scale. He crossed the continent by foot, horse, wagon, boat, train and automobile, photographing under widely varied conditions. Yet the book’s importance lies not only in that labor. The portfolio arrangement reveals how he shaped a vast body of material into a deliberate account: portraiture is set alongside landscape and ceremonial imagery, connecting individual presence with place and collective tradition. It is at once an extensive historical record and a sustained example of early twentieth-century photographic authorship.

Published by TASCHEN in 2025, this multilingual hardcover comprises 696 pages. For a photography collection, its particular value is the opportunity to study Curtis’s project at portfolio scale—the form in which its range, repetitions and organizing ideas become most legible. Rather than reducing the work to a handful of canonical images, the volume restores the breadth of a complex, decades-long undertaking and provides a substantial basis for considering how photography has pictured Indigenous cultures and histories in North America.