Dan Flores

With offices both in New York for marketing and Seattle for the photographic end, he embarked on years and years of one whirlwind trip after another.

Volume 1 on The Navajos in the Southwest came out in 1907, and it was led off by a photo whose title, The Vanishing Race, captured the whole underlying premise.

Over the next seven years, ten more volumes appeared.

By this time, Curtis had gone through Morgan's initial investment and was barely past halfway to his goal.

His novel solution for money was to turn into an indie filmmaker.

But his silent film, In the Land of the Headhunters, A Quacky Oodle Romeo and Juliet Story, was a box office flop.

By taking out a second mortgage on his house, this one without his wife's knowledge, and appealing to the Morgan family for continued financing, Curtis was finally able to turn out the last nine volumes of his grand project.

While all this was happening, the last volume, 20, finally appeared in 1930, much of the rest of Curtis's world was imploding.

Clara filed for divorce from her absentee husband in 1916.

Curtis was convicted of failure to pay alimony in 1918.

And when the divorce was settled in 1920, Clara got possession not only of his studio, but of all the negatives he'd shot so far.

The subsequent disappearance of Curtis' studio materials dating before 1920 has led to one of the great treasure hunts in Western art, so far to no avail.

Clara wasn't through, though, having him arrested one more time as he passed through Seattle en route home from his last photo shoot for the North American Indian in 1927.

Curtis lived for another quarter century without ever producing another significant work.

So the meaning of his life is largely synonymous with what we think about his great project.

There's no question today of Curtis's status as an artist, but the mesmerizing quality of his images is largely a consequence of his understanding of the nostalgic allure of Native America.

Other photographers and painters certainly attempted this, but no one else pulled it off with the elan that Curtis did.

On the other hand, there's always the question of whether you can entirely trust a Curtis image.

The text of the North American Indian, edited by Frederick Webb Hodge of the Bureau of Ethnology, presents a straightforward ethnography of the tribes as Curtis found them.

But of course, hardly anyone reads the text anymore.