EDWARD S. CURTIS: THE WOMEN
EDWARD S. CURTIS and THE WOMEN: A PERSONAL RESPONSE
The Women: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian will show at Schumacher
Gallery to October 18, 2006. There are forty two photographs in this five star photography exhibit. The subjects, North American Indian women, were not photographed "in living color"--such technology did not exist in the early 1900s--but they have, like lovers on the Grecian urn, been "caught forever" in "tissue" and "gold."
Thus, they can speak to us from pale, almond-toned "canvasses" which suggest a perennial twilight. . .
BUFFALO BERRY GATHERERS, 1909: A sky as vacuous as unbleached muslin meets the scruffy Plains half way. Two very young Mandan women, their hair smooth and black, "star" in this simple composition: Sky, women, berry tree, the prairie. (Or a meadow.)
By 1909 these girls' "every day" dresses were likely "store bought" or, at least, were dresses cut from traders' calico. Edward S. Curtis, photographer, probably asked the girls to wear traditional, perhaps ceremonial, garb for this photograph.
I like to think the two women are sisters. Near Sister has donned a wide white robe, kind of a tent dress, softened white leather,maybe. She wears it bunched-in at the waist by a wide belt. We see only one of her hands. Curtis has asked Near Sister to pose with one hand touching the scraggly fingers of the berry bush. It's a classical pose, a benediction. Her face is hidden.
Second Sister, standing less than a foot away from Near Sister, reveals half of her earnest sweet face. She appears to be younger and smaller than Near Sister. Mr. Curtis knows his classical composition. Second Sister wears a sporty long dress, one with studs and beads on the shawl collar. Near Sister wears more fringe!
The teenagers stand motionless for a long time while Mr. Curtis takes photographs.
They can't see me, but I am standing beside them. Our thirty toes hide in tough prairie grass. The prickle- leaves push through my tee shirt and my cut offs. --Suddenly, the sisters yelp, drop their poses, and run barefoot down the dirt path to where Mother is beating on a cook pan, calling them home.
They throw their picture clothes on the bed, and, wearing home made petticoats, commence to clear a wobbly table and scrape off the dishes. Mother wraps the fancy dresses in used pattern paper, saves them for the next "pow wow" or another photo shoot.
THE RUSH GATHERER, 1910. In this long narrow sepia tone the hour is Curtis' apparent favorite: dusk or dawn, an indescribable half light. The scaly bark canoe turns up at each end, floats like a sea monster, smack dab in the middle of a seamless lake.
The horizon melts into the water, exactly half way up. (Well, almost exactly.)-- As it does in Buaffalo Berry Gatherers, a simple photo composition "works." We can notice the razor sharp lines of the reeds, or rushes, standing erect, brashly, on each side of the canoe which casts its own shadow. This Kutenai woman, the Rush Gatherer, consists of a small hunched blob in the canoe. She wears a slouched straw hat. A rush hat. To us she is a nobody, a dark shape. The reeds are taller than she is . Weaving reeds, cutting them, selling them--that's her subsistence job! The Rush Gatherer is dirt poor. She reminds us, as have feminist scholars, that "Anonymous was a woman."
Again. There are forty two photos waiting for you at Schumacher Gallery. Nesplim Girl. A Cachula Child. Daughters of the Chief. Two Bear Women. Mohave Potter. They will tell you stories if you let them.
OPENINGS . . . At Schumacher Gallery, at "The Women's " well attended opening on September 8, The Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio provided a Blessing ceremony and a drumming. I noticed, happily, one or two women drumming in the circle.--At least they were chanting in the circle!--After awhile a young college guy played soft jazz on his guitar. That was cool. Cheese, fruit, and pastries were for the tasting. Real crystal and clear plastic glittered on steel refreshment tables. The guests were not only "speaking of Michelangelo" as T.S. Eliot would have said, but they were discussing football scores and looking at gorgeous photographs of Native American Indian women who had posed over a hundred years ago
against what Teddy Roosevelt had named "the Vanishing Frontier." --If you were over twenty four, wine was available.
--Strange things happen during Ohio's "Indian Summers." The ghost of master painter/teacher Robert Henri, American, 1865-1929, plastic glass in hand, strolled in from an adjoining room. He was pleased. he was puzzled. Nobody saw him but me!-- He was thinking of the rapid traverse of culture --since 1876 at Custer's Last Stand, since the Wounded Knee Massacre, 1890, since the takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969! --"It is a mad, mad world," he mumbled, and asked the pony-tailed waitress to refill his glass. He remembered. . .
In 1905 the photographer Edward S. curtis and his partners had thrown a brilliant party at the Waldorf Astoria in order to celebrate, and to sell, Curtis documentation of Indian Life. There were 20 volumes and 270 photographs and prints and they sold like corn cakes. The "opening" was a scene worthy of the novelist, E.L. Doctorow: the railroad tycoons --Jay Gould, James T. Hill, yes, J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbuilt --their socially prominent wives poured into satin gowns, --were in attendance. One can imagine that champagne flowed, like the East River. Curtis' large "Indian" photographs were accompanied by a lantern show, stereoptican slides, huges prints, early sound narration. Diamonds glittered, orchids bloomed. it was, indeed, a night to remember.
Robert Henri shook his head: paradoxically, the railroad, its voracious slaughter of buffalo, and Indians, had been, and would be, a prime factor in making the American frontier and its indigenous people "vanish." Henri's ghost, familiar with the (socialist) Masses magazine and the Ash Can school of painting, asked for another drink and thought about a recurring phenomenon:
Indigenous tribal people continue to vanish, to be bombed and exploited, to migrate, to live at risk. Their children, or grandchildren, will drum at art openings, nibble cheese , and sip Seven Up among chatting art lovers. Henri's Ghost realized that these images--distanced, rearranged, recalled--form a kind of reality that is both actual and unrealized. Of the way we want it to be, the way it was. The way it is now. He realized that Curtis' beautiful photographs can stand on their own.
"After all," he whispered to the young wait person, "the greatest photographers studied great paintings."
TheWomen is a transcendently beautiful show. A don't- miss. There's a book, too: Edward S. Curtis: The Women, by Christopher Cardozo. The Schumacher Gallery is on Fourth Floor of Blackmore Library, Capital University, 1 College and Main in Columbus, Ohio. Hours are Monday-Saturday, 1:00 to 5 p.m.
The Women: Edward S. Curtis and the North American Indian will show at Schumacher
Gallery to October 18, 2006. There are forty two photographs in this five star photography exhibit. The subjects, North American Indian women, were not photographed "in living color"--such technology did not exist in the early 1900s--but they have, like lovers on the Grecian urn, been "caught forever" in "tissue" and "gold."
Thus, they can speak to us from pale, almond-toned "canvasses" which suggest a perennial twilight. . .
BUFFALO BERRY GATHERERS, 1909: A sky as vacuous as unbleached muslin meets the scruffy Plains half way. Two very young Mandan women, their hair smooth and black, "star" in this simple composition: Sky, women, berry tree, the prairie. (Or a meadow.)
By 1909 these girls' "every day" dresses were likely "store bought" or, at least, were dresses cut from traders' calico. Edward S. Curtis, photographer, probably asked the girls to wear traditional, perhaps ceremonial, garb for this photograph.
I like to think the two women are sisters. Near Sister has donned a wide white robe, kind of a tent dress, softened white leather,maybe. She wears it bunched-in at the waist by a wide belt. We see only one of her hands. Curtis has asked Near Sister to pose with one hand touching the scraggly fingers of the berry bush. It's a classical pose, a benediction. Her face is hidden.
Second Sister, standing less than a foot away from Near Sister, reveals half of her earnest sweet face. She appears to be younger and smaller than Near Sister. Mr. Curtis knows his classical composition. Second Sister wears a sporty long dress, one with studs and beads on the shawl collar. Near Sister wears more fringe!
The teenagers stand motionless for a long time while Mr. Curtis takes photographs.
They can't see me, but I am standing beside them. Our thirty toes hide in tough prairie grass. The prickle- leaves push through my tee shirt and my cut offs. --Suddenly, the sisters yelp, drop their poses, and run barefoot down the dirt path to where Mother is beating on a cook pan, calling them home.
They throw their picture clothes on the bed, and, wearing home made petticoats, commence to clear a wobbly table and scrape off the dishes. Mother wraps the fancy dresses in used pattern paper, saves them for the next "pow wow" or another photo shoot.
THE RUSH GATHERER, 1910. In this long narrow sepia tone the hour is Curtis' apparent favorite: dusk or dawn, an indescribable half light. The scaly bark canoe turns up at each end, floats like a sea monster, smack dab in the middle of a seamless lake.
The horizon melts into the water, exactly half way up. (Well, almost exactly.)-- As it does in Buaffalo Berry Gatherers, a simple photo composition "works." We can notice the razor sharp lines of the reeds, or rushes, standing erect, brashly, on each side of the canoe which casts its own shadow. This Kutenai woman, the Rush Gatherer, consists of a small hunched blob in the canoe. She wears a slouched straw hat. A rush hat. To us she is a nobody, a dark shape. The reeds are taller than she is . Weaving reeds, cutting them, selling them--that's her subsistence job! The Rush Gatherer is dirt poor. She reminds us, as have feminist scholars, that "Anonymous was a woman."
Again. There are forty two photos waiting for you at Schumacher Gallery. Nesplim Girl. A Cachula Child. Daughters of the Chief. Two Bear Women. Mohave Potter. They will tell you stories if you let them.
OPENINGS . . . At Schumacher Gallery, at "The Women's " well attended opening on September 8, The Native American Indian Center of Central Ohio provided a Blessing ceremony and a drumming. I noticed, happily, one or two women drumming in the circle.--At least they were chanting in the circle!--After awhile a young college guy played soft jazz on his guitar. That was cool. Cheese, fruit, and pastries were for the tasting. Real crystal and clear plastic glittered on steel refreshment tables. The guests were not only "speaking of Michelangelo" as T.S. Eliot would have said, but they were discussing football scores and looking at gorgeous photographs of Native American Indian women who had posed over a hundred years ago
against what Teddy Roosevelt had named "the Vanishing Frontier." --If you were over twenty four, wine was available.
--Strange things happen during Ohio's "Indian Summers." The ghost of master painter/teacher Robert Henri, American, 1865-1929, plastic glass in hand, strolled in from an adjoining room. He was pleased. he was puzzled. Nobody saw him but me!-- He was thinking of the rapid traverse of culture --since 1876 at Custer's Last Stand, since the Wounded Knee Massacre, 1890, since the takeover of Alcatraz Island in 1969! --"It is a mad, mad world," he mumbled, and asked the pony-tailed waitress to refill his glass. He remembered. . .
In 1905 the photographer Edward S. curtis and his partners had thrown a brilliant party at the Waldorf Astoria in order to celebrate, and to sell, Curtis documentation of Indian Life. There were 20 volumes and 270 photographs and prints and they sold like corn cakes. The "opening" was a scene worthy of the novelist, E.L. Doctorow: the railroad tycoons --Jay Gould, James T. Hill, yes, J.P. Morgan and Cornelius Vanderbuilt --their socially prominent wives poured into satin gowns, --were in attendance. One can imagine that champagne flowed, like the East River. Curtis' large "Indian" photographs were accompanied by a lantern show, stereoptican slides, huges prints, early sound narration. Diamonds glittered, orchids bloomed. it was, indeed, a night to remember.
Robert Henri shook his head: paradoxically, the railroad, its voracious slaughter of buffalo, and Indians, had been, and would be, a prime factor in making the American frontier and its indigenous people "vanish." Henri's ghost, familiar with the (socialist) Masses magazine and the Ash Can school of painting, asked for another drink and thought about a recurring phenomenon:
Indigenous tribal people continue to vanish, to be bombed and exploited, to migrate, to live at risk. Their children, or grandchildren, will drum at art openings, nibble cheese , and sip Seven Up among chatting art lovers. Henri's Ghost realized that these images--distanced, rearranged, recalled--form a kind of reality that is both actual and unrealized. Of the way we want it to be, the way it was. The way it is now. He realized that Curtis' beautiful photographs can stand on their own.
"After all," he whispered to the young wait person, "the greatest photographers studied great paintings."
TheWomen is a transcendently beautiful show. A don't- miss. There's a book, too: Edward S. Curtis: The Women, by Christopher Cardozo. The Schumacher Gallery is on Fourth Floor of Blackmore Library, Capital University, 1 College and Main in Columbus, Ohio. Hours are Monday-Saturday, 1:00 to 5 p.m.
posted by Liz James at 2:17 PM
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