Native Nations : First North Americans as Seen by Edward Curtis [SOLD]

NATIVE NATIONS First Americans as seen by Edward S. Curtis

Edited by Christopher Cardozo

Publisher: A Bulfinch Press Book - Little, Brown and Company

First Edition, 1993, hardback with slipcover

Very good condition

Oversize at 14 x 11 inches

From the Slipcover

Native Nations is a magnificent distillation of the best of photographer / ethnographer / adventurer Edward S. Curtis's landmark twenty-volume study of the Indian peoples of North America.

Begun in 1898, Curtis's thirty-year-long venture attracted the attention and support of such powerful men as Theodore Roosevelt, Edward Harriman, and J. Pierpont Morgan. During this period, Curtis also endured every imaginable hardship and encountered great personal risk. Ultimately, the project broke his health, ruined his marriage, and left him bankrupt. He managed, however, to make over 40,000 negatives, many on glass plates, often as large as 14 x 17 inches. That Curtis achieved this during the very period the Indian way of life was being destroyed makes his achievement all the more remarkable.

The final published work comprised more than 2,200 photogravures and a thousand pages of text, in twenty volumes and twenty supplementary portfolios of larger-size plates. The most ambitious publication ever undertaken by a single man, it remains a watershed in American publishing history. And here now, the finest examples of Curtis's work have been brought together in one volume by the renowned Curtis expert, Christopher Cardozo. They are magnificently reproduced as quadratones to an unprecedented standard of fidelity by the world's authority on printing technologies, Richard Benson.

"These elegant, evocative, haunting photographs—together with a foreword by George P. Horse Capture, a leading Native American scholar of American Indian art, an introductory note by Cardozo, and the portions of Curtis's original text that highlight the history and context of each image—provide an extraordinary view into the emotional and spiritual lives of the indigenous North Americans, an opportunity for all to experience deeply an aspect of our history and of our identity rarely witnessed in modern American culture.

"Beautifully designed and printed, this powerful combination of word and image stands alone as an invaluable and irreplaceable record of the native nations before their cultures and spirit were so devastated by the wave of westward expansion."