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L’attrapeur d’ombres, la vie épique d’Edward S. Curtis

Timothy Egan

His name is so linked to The North American Indian, his major work, one could easily mistake him for a Comanche, a Crow or a Nez Percé. Actually, Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) was the perfect prototype of the small white American. He was the son of a veteran from the Civil War, an eternal invalid who had to leave school early on to make his family’s living– hunting, fishing, cultivating the earth. He fell from a tree and hurt his back, so he spent his year of convalescence building a dark room. What followed sounds more like a fairy tale: after mortgaging his piece of land, he became the most sought after photographer in Seattle, and then developed a passion for the Indian America. He became the friend of President Ted Roosevelt, was financed by JP Morgan – the richest man in the world -, and went on to build an unequalled photographic encyclopaedia. But not only: it is literary as well with a lexicon, sound, with recordings on wax rolls) of the “first American Nations”. The book tells the saga by recalling what this long search (1907-1930) will cost him: his marriage, his money and his health. Curtis lived at the end of his life by using his wits, and even invented a machine to select gold or and died almost poor. A complete game of his twenty volumes are worth today two million dollars.


L’attrapeur d’ombres, la vie épique d’Edward S. Curtis (French translation of Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), by Timothy Egan, Albin Michel, 2015, 448 p., 24 €.

L’attrapeur d’ombres, la vie épique d’Edward S. Curtis - Timothy Egan


Review published in the newsletter #405 - from 5 November 2015 to 11 November 2015

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