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CURREY, FRANCIS EDMUND
(1814–1896)
Irish
Francis was born on 15 March 1814 to William and
Anna Currey (nee Tappenden). His father was an agent
on the Duke of Devonshire’s Irish estate at Lismore
Castle, County Waterford. Francis graduated from Trin-
ity College, Cambridge and in 1855 called to the bar at
Lincoln’s Inn. He took over from his father as Lismore’s
land steward in 1839, later he was known for his kind-
ness to victims of the 1847 Irish famine.
Currey took up photography in the early 1850s and in
1855 joined both the Photographic Society and Photo-
graphic Exchange Club. He built a darkroom at Lismore
Castle where fi rstly he used the calotype process and
later wet-collodion. He exhibited 16 small studies at the
1856 Photographic Society exhibition. His photographic
studies were mostly made around the Lismore estate
and included still-lives of game, fl owers and plants,
landscapes and portraits. He was a prominent member
of the Amateur Photographic Association and received
at least two certifi cates of excellence from them in the
early 1860s.
He carried on with his photography into the 1880’s,
re-printing some of his earlier pictures onto platinum
paper. He was agent at Lismore until 1885 when he
fi nally retired. He died on the 6th June 1896.
Ian Sumner
CURTIS, EDWARD SHERIFF (1868–1952)
American photographer
Edward S. Curtis is known principally for his serial, The
North American Indian, which was published between
the years 1907 and 1930 in the form of twenty separate
volumes of illustrated text and twenty accompany-
ing portfolios of photogravures. Since the 1970s, the
work has enjoyed a popular revival, rescuing Curtis’
name from relative obscurity. However, the Project has
often met with critical ambivalence and has altogether
eclipsed other segments of his oeuvre, which include
signifi cant contributions to geographical surveys, award-
winning portrait and landscape photography, indepen-
dently produced documentary fi lm, cinematography for
Hollywood movies, and several popular books.
Curtis’ photographic career began in the 1870s, when
he worked as an assistant in a St. Paul, Minnesota studio.
By 1891, after a forced hiatus from the trade in order to
support his family after his father’s death, he became a
partner in a Seattle portrait studio with Rasmus Rothi,
and later, in 1893 with Thomas Guptill. An 1896 issue of
Argus gave special mention to the success of the Curtis-
Guptill partnership, and their bronze medal from the
Photographer’s Association of America for excellence
in posing and lighting was prominently noted. In 1897
Curtis continued his studio work alone, specializing in
portraits and Northwestern landscapes.
Inspired by the romantic, nineteenth century- concep-
tion of the ‘noble savage,’ Curtis began photographing
Seattle area Indians as early as 1895. His fi rst Native
American subject is said to have been Princess Ange-
line, Chief Seattle’s daughter. In both 1898 and 1899,
Curtis won fi rst place in the National Photographic
Convention’s Genre Class for his images, Evening on
Puget Sound, The Clam Digger, and The Mussel Gath-
erer, all of which featured images of Native Americans.
However, it was his chance rescue on Mt. Rainier of
C. Hart Merriam, Chief of the U.S. Biological Survey,
Gifford Pinchot, Chief of the U.S. Forestry Department,
and George Bird Grinnell, an eminent ethnologist that
drew Curtis down the path ultimately leading to the
North American Indian Project. In gratitude for his as-
sistance, Grinnell asked Curtis to accompany him on
the E.H. Harriman Expedition to Alaska, an outing for
the wealthy Harriman family that would include over
30 natural scientists and closely resembled the federally
supported Western geographical surveys of the 1870s.
The expedition yielded a 10-volume publication, illus-
trated by Curtis’ photographs, which numbered over
5,000 by trip’s end.
Critics have generally described Curtis’ earliest
images of Native Americans as commercially driven,
appealing more to aesthetics and to the late Victorian
appetite for the exotic than concerned with ethnographic
documentation. It was George Bird Grinnell’s predic-
tion that the Indian way of life would soon disappear,
during a 1900 trip to view a Sun Dance gathering of
Blackfoot, Bloods, and Algonquin on the Piegan res-
ervation in Montana that prompted Curtis to approach
his work with more scientifi c rigor. Disease, starvation,
and forced assimilation into Anglo-American culture
were slowly eradicating authentic Native American
customs and way of life. Although Curtis began study-
ing theories of ethnography, he was still obligated to
fund his fi eldwork with salable material. He therefore
photographed only those tribes that confi rmed popular
notions of Indian identity.
Curtis soon found that funds generated by his studio
and the small grant he received from Doubleday Pub-
lishers in 1904 were not enough to defray his fi eldwork
expenses. A 1905 exhibition of his photographs at the
Waldorf-Astoria in New York brought his work to the
attention of Theodore Roosevelt, who became a life-long
Curtis admirer and wrote the introduction to the series’
fi rst volume. Through a laudatory letter written to Curtis
about his work, Roosevelt indirectly facilitated a Janu-
ary 1906 meeting with railroad magnate J.P. Morgan,
who agreed to fi nance Project-related fi eldwork for