Dan Flores

Mostly you're stunned by the depth of character in Curtis's human subjects.

As George Horscapture of Montana's Fort Belknap Reservation said of his first sight of a Curtis portrait, the world stopped for several moments.

That was a special case, since the portrait was of Horsecaptor's great-grandfather.

But he speaks for most of us, whether we encounter Curtis's images in books, on calendars, or on postcards.

And these days, his sepia photos do seem to be everywhere.

We're spellbound, as if deposited in the past by a time machine.

But why?

What is it we see in Curtis's photographs?

Who was this shadow catcher, as some of his subjects called him, who in a good piece of one lifetime managed to befriend some 80 tribes of Indians and shoot more than 40,000 photographs of them?

How was someone like this on the scene in the Old West with a camera?

Well, that's the first fantasy about the shadow catcher to brush aside.

Curtis was not photographing 80 indigenous tribes while the frontier raged on.

The census had declared the frontier over a full decade before Curtis set about his project.

As for who he was, there's the simple characterization of the kind we'd all reject if it were applied to us.

Then there's the more complex, sin-of-flesh biography.

The simple version is that he was an almost uneducated Seattle mountaineer who in the 20th century became consumed with romantic notions about how Indians once lived.

He had some talent, got lucky with influential friends, and so obsessively pursued his goal that he sacrificed his marriage and money to consummate it and died virtually forgotten.

The longer version is more interesting and gets us a lot closer to being able to answer the kinds of questions people mouth silently when they stand wrapped before the photographs.

Like so many first-generation Americans who grew up in the Northwest, Curtis's family roots were in the Midwest, in his case, Wisconsin.

His father sold their farm to become an itinerant preacher by the time Edward was 12, but he had briefly gotten to attend a one-room school that seems to have been his only formal education.