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Reviews tagging 'Misogyny'
Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis by Timothy Egan
1 review
brogan7's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
slow-paced
4.0
This book traces the history of Edward S Curtis, a photographer from the early twentieth century who set about documenting the lives and ways of the First Nations people as their numbers were dwindling and their cultures and languages were being systematically destroyed by the laws of white settlers.
It is an uneasy history in that Curtis is a maverick, but a white man, and in this era of concern about cultural appropriation, and photography having the potential to be particularly voyeuristic, I certainly felt as a reader that I was watching for his real motivations and cultural sensitivity. The writer of the book, his biographer, is not so concerned with these issues and at times the text has a tone I find jarring - from the bookflap: "In the end, [Curtis] fulfilled his promise: He made the Indians live forever."
However, overall the text is fair to the man (Curtis) and to indigenous history, I believe, in that Curtis well understood and despised the politics at play, and was a true radical in how he embraced the First Nations traditions not as exotica but as a rich, real, lived experience and in relationship with the people he was taking pictures of.
The text seems exceedingly uncharitable to Curtis's wife,(who eventually divorced him in 1914) unnecessarily so in my opinion - when Egan defends Curtis from accusations of adultery, this defense seems curious and unfounded, and later when Curtis refers to infidelities in a letter, which, albeit, he could be making up, but Egan dismisses this even after having specifically cast Clara as looking for an excuse to justify grounds for divorce .
It's a very interesting, if at times dry, book about the history of First Nations in North America. It's worth reading just the chapter on Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé alone (chapter 4), for an illumination of the little-known history of Indigenous resistance and colonizers' suppression of it.
Curtis got it...and more with than that, he documented it in real time. He was a flawed hero, for sure, and he certainly didn't get the recognition in the forms he should have, in his own time...but he created a document that even today serves for Indigenous revival and language and culture reclamation. He understood the skills he had and how to put them to use...in that, he had a life of service.
It is an uneasy history in that Curtis is a maverick, but a white man, and in this era of concern about cultural appropriation, and photography having the potential to be particularly voyeuristic, I certainly felt as a reader that I was watching for his real motivations and cultural sensitivity. The writer of the book, his biographer, is not so concerned with these issues and at times the text has a tone I find jarring - from the bookflap: "In the end, [Curtis] fulfilled his promise: He made the Indians live forever."
However, overall the text is fair to the man (Curtis) and to indigenous history, I believe, in that Curtis well understood and despised the politics at play, and was a true radical in how he embraced the First Nations traditions not as exotica but as a rich, real, lived experience and in relationship with the people he was taking pictures of.
The text seems exceedingly uncharitable to Curtis's wife,
It's a very interesting, if at times dry, book about the history of First Nations in North America. It's worth reading just the chapter on Chief Joseph of the Nez Percé alone (chapter 4), for an illumination of the little-known history of Indigenous resistance and colonizers' suppression of it.
Curtis got it...and more with than that, he documented it in real time. He was a flawed hero, for sure, and he certainly didn't get the recognition in the forms he should have, in his own time...but he created a document that even today serves for Indigenous revival and language and culture reclamation. He understood the skills he had and how to put them to use...in that, he had a life of service.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Colonisation, Misogyny, and Genocide
Depression
More...