Edward Curtis (1868-1952) was an American photographer and ethnologist whose work focused on the American West and on Native American people.
From 1897 to 1928 Curtis photographed members of over 80 tribes, took over 40,000 images on 14 x 17 glass plate negatives and made over 10,000 wax cylinder
recordings of Native American language and music. Curtis’s goal was to document Native American life, pre-colonization, and culminated in the production of a
20 Volume set of the North American Indian.
In 1906 millionaire arts patron J.P. Morgan was swayed by the beauty of Curtis’s photographs to support the North American Indian Project financially for
$15,000 a year for five years ($2.5m today) for the fieldwork portion of the project, not for writing, or production of the work forcing Curtis to struggle
incessantly to raise funds. Curtis received no salary for the project, which lasted more than 20 years.
The North American Indian was perhaps the most ambitious publication ever undertaken by a single man, and it was widely hailed as a landmark in American
publishing history. In 1911, the New York Herald said that it was the most gigantic undertaking since the publication of the King James Edition of the Bible.