Rarity 16.8/100 · Collector 0/100 · Deal 41.72/100 · Listings: 2 · Avg price: $44.78 · Min price: $26.22

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Edward S. Curtis brings a concentrated selection from the photographer’s vast record of Indigenous peoples across North America into a single 192-page volume. Published by Taschen America in 2012 and credited to Hans Christian Adam as contributor, the book combines Curtis’s photographs with an account of the life and travels that shaped his long undertaking, extending from the prairies to his later involvement with Hollywood film studios.

For more than three decades, Curtis pursued an encyclopedic project in words and pictures, eventually realized as The North American Indian: twenty volumes of text accompanied by twenty portfolios and more than 2,000 illustrations. This book necessarily works by selection. Rather than attempting to reproduce that immense structure, it presents notable images as an introduction to the scale, visual language, and organizing ambition of Curtis’s career.

The photographs also require historically alert viewing. Curtis sought to preserve what he understood as traditional Indigenous life under threat of disappearance, yet his pictures did more than record their subjects: they helped form a durable public image of Native Americans. Their formal authority must therefore be considered alongside the assumptions embedded in the project—its ideas of tradition, disappearance, documentation, and who controls representation. The volume’s biographical framework helps place the images within that broader cultural history.

For a serious photography collection, the book’s importance lies not in claims of rarity but in the focused access it provides to an unusually extensive and influential body of work. Its manageable selection permits close comparison of recurring subjects and pictorial strategies while retaining a sense of the larger project from which the images came. It is a useful volume for studying both Curtis’s photographic achievement and the complicated legacy of an archive that continues to shape how Indigenous North America has been pictured.