![]() ![]() Timothy Egan offers a stirring and affectionate portrait of an underknown figure in “Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis.” Egan, a Seattle-based author and a writer for The New York Times, asks us to see Curtis as a hero in the mythic Western mode - i.e., outdoorsy, virile, untainted by bourgeois values. Curtis spent his final years holed up in Southern California, living a marginal hand-to-mouth existence and consuming a pound of carrots a day in the hope of warding off blindness. His goal, he said, was to salvage a heritage from oblivion, to document all the tribes in North America that were still intact.The result was his magnum opus, “The North American Indian,” a 20-volume text-and-image extravaganza, published between 19, that was praised and then forgotten in short order. Traveling by rail, wagon and foot, he undertook a project that struck observers as ambitious and possibly insane. ![]() Edward Curtis deserves to be remembered as the American artist who racked up the most miles. ![]()
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