Limit search to available items
Book Cover
E-book
Author Zamir, Shamoon, author.

Title The gift of the face : portraiture and time in Edward S. Curtis's the North American Indian / Shamoon Zamir
Published Chapel Hill : The University of North Carolina Press, 2014

Copies

Description 1 online resource
Contents Cover -- Contents -- Portfolio -- PART I: Introduction -- 1 Photography, Portraiture, and Time -- 2 A Third Something: Image and Text -- PART II: Time and History -- 3 The Gift of the Face -- 4 Against History's Monopoly of Time -- 5 Achieving Portraiture -- PART III: Autography -- 6 The Crow and Photography -- 7 Upshaw and Upshaw-Apsaroke -- 8 Portraits as Self-Portraits of the Artist -- PART IV: Art Science -- 9 A Broad and Luminous Picture -- 10 A People of the Twentieth Century: Coda -- Appendix -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Acknowledgments -- Index -- A -- B -- C -- D -- E -- F -- G -- H -- I -- J -- K -- L -- M -- N -- O -- P -- Q -- R -- S -- T -- U -- V -- W -- Y -- Z
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
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Print version record
Subject Curtis, Edward S., 1868-1952. North American Indian.
SUBJECT Curtis, Edward S., 1868-1952. North American Indian
North American Indian (Curtis, Edward S.) fast
Subject Indians of North America -- Portraits -- History -- 20th century
Photography in ethnology -- North America
SOCIAL SCIENCE -- Ethnic Studies -- Native American Studies.
HISTORY -- United States -- 20th Century.
HISTORY -- Americas (North, Central, South, West Indies)
HISTORY -- North America.
HISTORY -- United States -- 20th Century.
Indians of North America
Photography in ethnology
North America
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9781469611761
1469611767
9781469615653
1469615657