Published by Bulfinch Press in 1993, Native Nations: First North Americans as Seen by Edward S. Curtis gathers 125 photographs of Indigenous peoples of North America within a 160-page volume. The images date from Curtis’s work around the turn of the twentieth century and address both individual appearance and cultural tradition. Accompanying text extends the book beyond a portfolio, placing the photographs within the human and cultural concerns assigned to them by the publication.

Curtis began his sustained effort to photograph Native North American communities shortly after the century’s turn. The undertaking continued for roughly twenty-five years; its larger expression, The North American Indian, was published between 1907 and 1930 with the stated purpose of recording traditional Native cultures. Native Nations returns to that body of work decades later, reducing an extensive project to a concentrated anthology intended for a late-twentieth-century audience.

The subtitle’s phrase “as seen by Edward S. Curtis” is crucial. These photographs concern their Indigenous subjects, but they also preserve the viewpoint of the photographer who selected, framed, and interpreted them. Read accordingly, the volume is not simply a record of cultural life. It is also a document of how such lives were pictured in an era when photography and ethnographic ambition were closely entangled. The selection allows attention to move between the historical information within the photographs and the perspective governing their production.

For a serious photobook collection, the first-edition hardcover deserves attention as a distinct 1993 editorial presentation of a much earlier photographic archive. Its value lies in the intersection of subject, authorship, and retrospective selection: 125 images, accompanied by text, make Curtis’s prolonged project available in a comparatively compact form. The book offers a focused basis for examining both a major photographic undertaking and the complicated historical conditions through which Indigenous North America was represented.