Taos Water Girls

Edward S. Curtis, Taos Water Girls, 1905

Whenever I get an email about some auction or other, I usually find something being advertised that charms me.

I know Edward S. Curtis's work and I seldom see one of his that I've never seen before. Correction, a good one of his, because every photographer has second- and third-rate pictures that haven't been widely published or seen.

Edward Sheriff Curtis, of course, was the protean but problematic documentarian of Native Americans at the end of the frontier period. Few photographers ever worked harder, but his pictorialist style and ethnographic assumptions don't fit well with modern ideas or tastes. My favorite book of his is Native Nations, the Calloway title with stunningly great reproductions. To my surprise, this book is still easily available for very reasonable prices—it's a beautifully produced book and I highly recommend it, to photographers, fans of fine printing, photobook lovers, Curtis fans, people interested in the Wild West or American Indians, or any combination of the above. There's a copy on Amazon for $24.91, and that's a steal for a book of this quality—new, it cost $60, and that was in 1993 dollars ($107 today).

...And there it is: "Taos Water Girls" is on page 65. Thought so. But it's one of the pictures the book's reproduction—dark and rich—doesn't suit. (There are so many that it does suit.) I was more charmed by this higher-keyed JPEG at the auction site. The writeup says that only about one in 500 of Curtis's prints are platinum prints. I'd love to see this someday as he printed it. Visualizing this JPEG in my mind as a platinum print makes me suspect it might be something special.

Unconscious style permeates eras
Curious, isn't it, how the style of 1905 comes through so strongly? "Taos Water Girls" puts me in mind of things like Gertrude Käsebier or something by one of the Brandywine School illustrators, maybe Howard Pyle's "Two Lovers in the Garden" (I couldn't find a date for the illustration—although you can buy it framed from Wal-Mart! What a fate—but Pyle died in 1911).

Gertrude Käsebier, Blessed Art Thou Among Women (1899)

Howard Pyle, Two Lovers in a Garden

Here's the writeup for "Taos Water Girls" at the auction site:

About This Lot
Taos is the northernmost of all the Native American Pueblos. It is located in present day New Mexico and was first visited by outsiders in 1540. The Pueblo had already been occupied for centuries at that time. The young women in the photograph are carrying water back to their pueblo in beautiful traditional jars. The trees on either side of them are cottonwoods, which are often found near mountain streams in the southwest. The sky is contrasted with the deep, rich foreground makes this image unusually compelling and three-dimensional. It is estimated that as few as 1 in 500 Curtis prints are platinum, making this vintage platinum print all the more desirable and rare. This print was created by hand in Curtis’ [sic] Seattle studio.

Bids start at $5,000 for the print.

Mike

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(To see all the comments, click on the "Comments" link below.)
Featured Comments from:

Geoff Wittig: "When Curtis was active, platinum printing was popular among fine art photographers and pre-coated platinum papers were commercially available. But his images were mostly experienced as photogravure reproductions, both in his magnum opus The North American Indian and as separate prints. Photogravures are pretty sympathetic to the tonality and 'feel' of platinum prints. I got to see the large collection of Curtis prints on display at the Crazy Horse monument in South Dakota some years back. They're amazing. It was worth the trip just to see them. Which made me pull out my copy of the late Richard Benson's wonderful The Printed Image (2008), a compendium of all then available methods of photo reproduction. Benson's explanation of how a photogravure works is a model of clarity. And unfortunately the book is now a collectible going for >$250."

Mike replies: Hopefully everyone who was reading TOP in 2008 bought Richard Benson's book, as it was our "Book of the Year" that year. And Native Nations was printed under Richard Benson's direction (and that of Nicholas Calloway) using a near-continuous-tone process Richard developed especially for printing these images.

LanceSaintPaul: "I did buy the Benson book back then as a direct result of your featuring it. Thanks again."

Kenneth Tanaka: "That's an interesting auction of Curtis’s work. I don’t recall seeing one of his platinum prints. The Art Institute of Chicago here has a small collection of Curtis’s prints, all photogravures, acquired from a collector in 1975. Given that the provenance of the Artnet pieces was specified as coming from a private collection in Minnesota I suspect (but don’t know) they’re from one of the most prominent collectors of Curtis works in America, Christopher Cardozo. I wish him luck with this sale. Like so many things these days, Curtis’s work has become culturally radioactive among top collectors and especially among major institutions. I admire the relentless dedication and sheer sweat that this work represents. But it was always a bit sentimental and schmaltzy for my taste. But for an excellent read try Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan. It’s available on Amazon in book or Kindle form.

Mike replies: Christopher Cardozo also had a hand in the making of the Native Nations book. The publisher was Bulfinch, by the way.

David Myers: "You might be interested in the 'Curtis' prints made by Jon Cone and his team using photogravure. Reasonable prices, I believe, around $800."

Comments

[David Myers]

Mike, you might be interested in the "Curtis" prints made by Jon Cone and his team using photogravure. Reasonable prices, I believe, around $800.

[PDLanum]

As a person with a degree in Anthropology, Curtis's images have always been a source of information. Since I can not afford a full complement of the originals I found a book from Taschen "The North American Indian" ISBN 978-3-8228-4772-5 as a substitute.
I read the book "Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis" by Timothy Egan. Reading this book and gave me insight on his work, methods and philosophy. In 2005 I took a workshop via NG in Santa Fe and visited a shop that had a very large collection of Curtis photogravure's and some of the original plates. Copies of the images taken from the original plates are simply stunning. I have also been down to the studio in Pioneer Square in Seattle where Imogen Cunningham worked while she was attending the University of Washington.

[scott kirkpatrick]

I've been working with a group responsible for a line of Indigo presses, and I checked my copy of Richard Benson's book (bought on a TOP recommendation in 2008) to see what he had to say. He gave it a paragraph in his last chapter on "what's coming next," and was very enthusiastic. It's an offset process, with as many inks as you like. Commercial work tends to go towards the more fluorescent colors, but there are currently at least three grades of black. The ink drops are drawn to a laser-created spot and the blanket is inked once for each impression -- all the ink goes to the paper. Ink densities go up to 800 dpi, and many sorts of screens are available. The software is complex, proprietary, and probably under constant development. But give an artist /craftsman like Benson access to one of these puppies, and anything would be possible.

[Jamea Lovely]

Lovely blog about photography. Kirk's already back, btw, lol.

[Jim Arthur]

You can also find a 1990’s print of Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Behind the Gare Saint-Lazare, Paris, 1932 by clicking the 20th-Century Art link on the Buy Menu. Opening bid is $9000.

[Print almost certainly by Voja Mitrovic, a name many TOP readers will recognize. --MJ]

[max pp]

Unrelated anecdote: ¿Do you know how I discovered Curtis? Reading a Joni Mitchell interview in the late 70s, when she mentioned her house had been robbed and the thiefs had taken everyting, including Edward S. Curtis prints, that don't look particularly valuable...

It wasn't easy then but I managed to find who he was and what he did. I'm still in awe today, almost 50 years later. An obsessive endeavor that ruined him, a respected and rich portrait gallery photographer for the well heeled who did not need to embark on such an undertaking. An artist's obsession is bad for your life, I guess.

[Matt]

If anyone is interested in browsing the complete set of The North American Indian, the bound volumes and supplements can be viewed (and downloaded as PDFs) here: https://tinyurl.com/yykxksy2

[Joe Kashi]

Ken's mention of Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Egan's book about Edward Curtis is spot-on.

Egan amply documents how Curtis was determined to collect complete and accurate ethnographic data and photographs about remaining Native Americans, such that he underwent great physical hardships and lost his business, his marriage, and much else in his attempt to do art and to capture that data while it was still relatively unaltered by contact with other cultures.

At the time, it was considered a pioneering effort.

Ken's comment about the current "radioactivity" of Curtis's work is undoubtedly correct. It's also a salutory warning about the fallacy of not taking into account then-contemporary circumstances and attitudes when later loftily and self-righteously passing judgment upon people working a century and more before.

[Ernest Zarate]

In addition to the source Matt referenced in his comment, another place to see all 20 volumes online is through the Northwestern University website: http://curtis.library.northwestern.edu/curtis/index.html

From NWU's "About the Project" description:

"For this project, the full twenty volumes of approximately 5000 pages of narrative text were scanned. They are presented integrated with the 2226 scans of the photogravure plates, which in the original Curtis work include 1500 images bound in the volumes and the remainder as loose plates in twenty accompanying portfolios.

"Both text and plates were scanned with a digital-back view camera and special book cradles developed by JJT, Inc. to protect the construction of the sewn volumes. All plates are color scans, while the text was scanned in grayscale and down-sampled to bi-tonal format for machine text conversion at University of Michigan."

NWU also notes that the plates can be viewed through The Library of Congress at https://www.loc.gov/collections/edward-s-curtis/about-this-collection/

Whatever one's opinion of Curtis and his project, through whatever lens, its scope and depth are impressive, IMHO.

[terence morrissey]

I seen about 10 years ago, Edward S. Curtis platinum prints on display in Sao Paulo alongside Claudia Andujar silver gelatin prints of the Yanomama, fantastic show.