Edward Sheriff Curtis
On the Housetop - Hopi

Public Domain

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Artist Edward Sheriff Curtis American, 1868–1952

CultureAmerican

Titles

On the Housetop - Hopi

Date1900

PlaceUnited States

MediumPlatinum print

DimensionsImage: 15 3/4 × 11 5/16 in. (40 × 28.7 cm)
Sheet: 15 3/4 × 11 5/16 in. (40 × 28.7 cm)

Credit LineMuseum purchase funded by Mr. and Mrs. Alfred C. Glassell, Jr., The Manfred Heiting Collection

Object number2004.371

Not on view

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Department

Photography

Special Collections

Manfred Heiting Collection of Photography

Object Type

PHOTOGRAPHS

DescriptionAt the turn of the 20th century, Edward Sheriff Curtis embarked on a thirty-year project to photograph the indigenous peoples of the United States and Alaska before the disappearance of their customs and traditions—an endeavor that eventually comprised forty thousand images of more than eighty Native American tribes. In 1907, he published the first of twenty volumes in a series titled The North American Indian. Each volume included ethnographic texts illustrated with photogravures—some fifteen hundred in all—and was accompanied by an unbound portfolio of larger photogravures. In this platinum print—far more rare than his photogravures—Hopi women on a house rooftop wear their hair in the picturesque squash-blossom whorls that denoted a woman’s unmarried status. The degree to which Curtis’s subjects were directed—and sometimes even costumed—by the photographer has led some modern critics to dismiss his images as a romanticized portrayal of a “vanishing race,” a false picture of the “noble savage” unsullied by modern civilization. Nonetheless, his photographs, extensive research, and some ten thousand wax-cylinder recordings of native languages and songs constitute an invaluable record of the American Indian.
ProvenanceAndrew Smith, Santa Fe.

Bought by Manfred Heiting from The Photographer's Gallery on 12/29/1986.
Exhibition History"The American Landscape East to West: Themes in Painting and Photography, 1780-1910" at The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, september 6, 2003-January 19, 2004.
Inscriptions, Signatures and Marks

verso bottom center in pencil "ESCMPM/106"

recto bottom right in ink "Curtis[underlined]"

Cataloguing data may change with further research.

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