When John from Texas recommended
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by
Timothy Egan, I was doubly pleased. First, because John always recommends great books and second because I have read two other impressive books by Egan:
The Worst Hard Time - The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl and
The Big Burn: Teddy Roosevelt and the Fire that Saved America. Both of these books are ones that I couldn't stop talking about while I was reading them and that I exhorted my friends and family to read as well.
Now, I am following John's suggestion and recommending another beautifully written and fascinating book by Timothy Egan. I loved
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher because it combined two of my interests, history and photography, but also because it introduced me to the works of Edward Curtis.
Curtis grew up in poverty so extreme that he and his family barely survived. He built his first camera using a lens that his ne'er-do-well father brought home from the Civil War. Though managing to escape his upbringing, build his own family, and rise to fame as a photographer, Curtis sacrificed everything he had acquired for his "big idea". Early in his career, Curtis recognized that the aboriginals of North America (especially the United States) and their cultures were disappearing from the continent. He set out to photograph the Indians and also to document their alphabets, languages, myths, religions, songs, customs and ways of life. The result was a twenty volume masterpiece
The North American Indian - an undertaking so massive that the
New York Herald compared it to the making of the King James edition of the
Bible. The photo titled
Oasis in the Badlands, which graces the cover of Egan's book, is one of 40,000 that Curtis took for the project. Egan's volume includes a selection of Curtis's photos, remarkable both for their technique and their artistry.
What have you been reading?
