A friend recently lent me a copy of Anne Makepeace’s book: Edward S. Curtis. Coming to light. Amazon.com describes it as follows:

Bold, sometimes abrasive, forever passionate, Edward Curtis was the quintessential romantic visionary. Curtis struggled through an impoverished boyhood in Minnesota to become a successful society photographer in Seattle. But he soon moved far beyond weddings and studio portraits to his life’s work: multi-volume photographic and ethnographic work on the vanishing world of the North American Indian. Initially, Teddy Roosevelt and J.P. Morgan backed the ambitious project. But as the work stretched over years, Curtis found himself alone with his vision, struggling to finance himself and his crews. The 20-volume North American Indians, finally completed in 1930, cost Curtis his marriage, his friendships, his home, and his health. By the time he died in 1952, he and his monumental work had lapsed into obscurity. In this richly designed book, Anne Makepeace, creator of an award-winning documentary on Curtis’s life, reexamines the lasting impact of his work. Curtis’s photographs, once ignored, now serve as a link between the romantic past and contemporary Native American communities, who have used his images to reclaim and resurrect their traditions.

Christopher Cardozo, author of Sacred Legacy: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian describes the book as follows:

This groundbreaking work combines for the first time Curtis’s masterpiece images with an in-depth understanding of his life and the forces, events and people that influenced him. Essential reading for anyone interested in Curtis, his photography, or traditional Native American cultures.

I think it’s that combination that I found most interesting about this work.

For some time, I’ve had a book about Curtis: Curtis: The North American Indian. The Complete Portfolios. However, as the title implies this book contains mostly Curtis’s photographs. Somehow it left me wanting for more. There is an interesting introductory essay by Hans Christian Adam entitled “Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian”, but it doesn’t provide as much information on Curtis’s life motivation for taking on this extraordinary piece of work, the situation of the North American Indian at the times. Nor should one expect a 26-page essay to provide as much information as a 216-page book. The two books complement each other well, one providing more text, the other providing more photographs.

I had always thought of Curtis as something of a charlatan: someone who presented an overly glorified picture of the North American Indian in order to further his own career and increase his own riches. I see now that I was completely wrong. As the portfolio: “The Curtis Controversy” points out, Curtis certainly did frame his images to block out any evidence of modern life. He also asked his subjects to dress in traditional clothing (even if the clothing at times was not appropriate to a particular tribe). From time to time, he even manipulated the natural environment. I was particularly impressed/appalled with the way in which he once procured a whale carcass so he could stage a whale hunt. But no charlatan would ever have put in the time, effort, energy and personal finances that Curtis did.

Inspired by reading this book I decided to get hold of one of the originals. Not, of course, one of the original, limited editions that Curtis provided to his funders. These were extremely expensive at the time ($3,000 for a set in 1906 equivalent to about $105,000 equivalent today) and would be far, far beyond my reach now. However, facsimile editions are available, so I decided to buy Volume 1: The Apache, Jicarillas, and Navaho. It’s about 160 pages long. In all there are 20 volumes! I haven’t read it yet, but if I like it I might over time get the other 19.

Edward S. Curtis. Coming to light is a terrific book. It’s easy to hold (not true of all photobooks), nicely laid out, and extremely informative. I haven’t enjoyed a book so much in a long time.

I’m a huge fan of Joel Meyerowitz and as soon as I saw reviews of this book: “Joel Meyerowitz: a question of color” I ordered a copy. I have to say that I was quite disappointed.

Before I explain why I’d like to explain what it’s about. Essentially, it’s in two parts: First, a text part where Meyerowitz provides an overview of how he started in photography and how his photography has evolved since then; and second, a series of photographs. The photographs are in pairs: two shots of the same subject, one in black and white and one in color. In this part Meyerowitz provides examples of the differences between black and white, and color photography. More of the book is taken up by the photographs than with the text. Since it’s mostly photographs it doesn’t take long to read it. When I read it today it took me about an hour and a half. Of course, if you spend a lot of time studying the photographs it might take longer.

Now, why was I disappointed with the book. First, Meyerowitz merely presents the pairs of photographs without any comments. I would have thought that he would have given his opinion on, in any given pair, whether the black and white works best (and why) and vice versa. I didn’t find this long collection of pairs of photographs to be particularly interesting. Maybe the point of it was to show that color photography and black and white photography are different, but both have their merits. If so I (and I suspect many other photographers) don’t need to be told. We already know.

Second, and most importantly I already have a truly excellent book by Meyerowitz called “Joel Meyerowitz: Where I Find Myself: A Lifetime Retrospective”. This is a much larger, and more expensive book, which unfortunately covers pretty much all the ground covered by “A Question of Color” and much, much more. So, I was disappointed that I spent my money on a book that really didn’t tell me anything the I hadn’t already discovered in “Where I Find Myself” (for my thoughts on that book see here.)

This is not a bad book. In fact, for many it might be a very good book, but for me it was just a waste of money. I can heartily recommend “Where I Find Myself” though.

In first paragraph of his introductory essay, “Collective Memories in Kodachrome”, Richard B. Woodward writes:

A young woman is seated on the edge of a blue Adirondack chair. A thin and expensive yellow sweater draped over her shoulders and bare arms, she wears a high-necked black dress and holds a cigarette in her right hand. Her icy hauteur might have caught the eye of Alfred Hitchcock, who could have cast her as the threatened heroine’s younger sister. The Anonymous Project is a collection of similar scenes – the sweet, awkward, random moments that no one recalls now unless someone had recorded them in a photograph.

And that’s pretty much what this book is. Apart from this essay at the beginning, and a brief interview with the founder and creative director of The Anonymous Project at the end, that’s pretty much it: about 140 or so pages of anonymous photographs (a small sample below) derived from Kodachrome Slides.

I was never much into slide photography. As Woodward writes:

The downside was that slides were much easier to make than to look at. Once they came back from development by Kodak or Agfa or Ilford or Fuji, it was not clear what to do with them. You couldn’t paste transparencies in a photo album or put them on your desk at the office…But the only chance most had to review how well (or poorly) they had photographed something in Kodachrome or Ektachrome was by setting up a slide projector…In the 1950s and ’60s, as projectors entered middle-class American and European homes and school classrooms, the slide show became a group activity, and more often than not a coerced one under the dictatorship of a parent or teacher.

The person in the family hierarchy who organized the trays or held the remote control – the role of photographer in chief was usually the father’s – would set the order and the pace, which was often agonizingly slow with long pauses for commentary. The slides themselves had no afterlife beyond their one-night-only appearance in a living room or den. Most disappeared back into their cardboard boxes and never saw daylight again. Shulman estimates that many of the images in his book have not been viewed by anyone, even by those to whom they once belonged, for 60 years.

I agree with most of what he writes, but not that they were “easier to make than to look at”. On my very rare forays into slide photography, I found it extremely difficult to get them right.

However, as I look at the photographs in the book, I can’t help but feel that maybe I should have tried harder. The pictures really are very bright and colorful.

I have a feeling that the quality of the photographs in the book are somewhat better than your average snapshot. Could this be because the process of making and showing slides was so cumbersome that only more dedicated photographers did it?

Good book though, I enjoy picking it up and browsing through it from time to time…and wondering who the people in the slides were, and what happened to them.