The Gift of the Face Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian / Shamoon Zamir.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Zamir, Shamoon.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

HISTORY / United States / 20th Century.

SOCIAL SCIENCE / Ethnic Studies / Native American Studies.

Photography in ethnology--North America.

Photography in ethnology.

Indians of North America--Portraits--History--20th century.

Indians of North America.

Curtis, Edward S., 1868-1952. North American Indian.

Genre:

Electronic books.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (576 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Manufacture:

Baltimore, Md. : Project MUSE, 2016

Place of Publication:

Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Language Note:

English

Summary:

"Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian is the most ambitious photographic and ethnographic record of Native American cultures ever produced. Published between 1907 and 1930 as a series of twenty volumes and portfolios, the work contains more than two thousand photographs intended to document the traditional culture of every Native American tribe west of the Mississippi. Many critics have claimed that Curtis's images present Native peoples as a "vanishing race," hiding both their engagement with modernity and the history of colonial violence. But in this major reappraisal of Curtis's work, Shamoon Zamir argues instead that Curtis's photography engages meaningfully with the crisis of culture and selfhood brought on by the dramatic transformations of Native societies. This crisis is captured profoundly, and with remarkable empathy, in Curtis's images of the human face. Zamir also contends that we can fully understand this achievement only if we think of Curtis's Native subjects as coauthors of his project. This radical reassessment is presented as a series of close readings that explore the relationship of aesthetics and ethics in photography. Zamir's richly illustrated study resituates Curtis's work in Native American studies and in the histories of photography and visual anthropology. "-- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Cover Page; The Gift of the Face; Copyright Page; Dedication; Contents; Portfolio; Part I: Introduction; Chapter 1: Photography, Portraiture, and Time; Chapter 2: A Third Something | Image and Text; Part II: Time and History; Chapter 3: The Gift of the Face; Chapter 4: Against History's Monopoly of Time; Chapter 5: Achieving Portraiture; Part III: Autography; Chapter 6: The Crow and Photography; Chapter 7: Upshaw and Upshaw-Apsaroke; Chapter 8: Portraits as Self-Portraits of the Artist; Part IV: Art Science; Chapter 9: A Broad and Luminous Picture

Chapter 10: A People of the Twentieth Century | CodaAppendix: The Distribution of Images in The North American Indian Showing Signs of Modernity; Notes; Bibliography; Acknowledgments; Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 303-316) and index.

Description based on print version record.

ISBN:

9798890844767

9781469615653

1469615657

9781469611761

1469611767

OCLC:

880878023