Dan Flores

Well, when the world discovered that Curtis was going to do this, when J.P.

Morgan...

gave him $75,000 to do it.

And Teddy Roosevelt, who was still president at the time, announced that he was writing the foreword for this.

Anthropologists of the day were stunned and shocked.

And Franz Boas at Columbia in particular said, I mean, this is fake.

You're going to have to fake it all because, I mean, we've had an Indian policy in place for a century to try to assimilate native people.

And a great many of the world's native people, including in the West, have been fully assimilated.

So how are you going to do this?

So the sort of label, the great fabricator, was placed on Curtis early on in the project.

And it's been a hard thing for him to live down.

I think most of the people who see these images now who buy Curtis calendars or postcards or buy books of Curtis's work probably don't understand that that at one time was – that this project was very controversial for that reason.

And one of the reasons I wanted to pair him in this episode with Vino Rice is because

Rice is – he's a contemporary.

He's a painter rather than a photographer.

He's a very wonderfully trained, academically trained portraitist in modern art.

And so he's really, really skilled.

He's got the same sort of romantic nostalgia about the West, operating from a different perspective, not the frontier for an American, but from the Carl My novels.

It's a very clumsy.

Because Carl My, the guy who made...