Following the Footprints of Edward S. Curtis: A Tale of the Vanishing Race

In 2007, Marie Clements, a Canadian playwright, was asked to prepare a play about the cultural history of Canada. She decided to write a play about Edward S. Curtis, the author of an epic series of photographic works titled The North American Indian, published between 1900 and 1930. Clements invited to the project Rita Leistner, a Canadian photographer, who was responsible for the graphic aspect of the play. Her task was to recreate the way taken by Curtis while immortalizing scenes from the life of the indigenous peoples. Both artists took a fascinating journey following the footsteps of Curtis documenting today’s presence of the First Nations in the United States and Canada. This article, based on the project of Clements and Leistner, discusses the ambiguity of the medium of photography, one which ‘recreates’the reality and at the same time allows the authors to‘create’ it. It presents three basic themes: the mission and work of Edward S. Curtis; the play titledThe Edward Curtis Project: A Modern Picture Story by Marie Clements; and the photographs –prepared by Rita Leistner – which were used in play and then published in the book of the same title. The purpose of this text is to present the project of the Canadian authors in the context of visual sociology and anthropology, and to show the potential of photography as a means of building social discourse and creating a narrative of a specific community. It is founded on the assumption that the artistic project in question – based on (both passive and active) participation of the authors in the everyday life of the community presented in it – becomes a source of valuable research material, which can then be subjected to scientific interpretations. KalinaKukiełko-Rogozińska, PhD – adjunct at the Institute of Sociology, University of Szczecin; author of the book titled Między nauką a sztuką. Teoria i praktyka artystyczna w ujęciu Marshalla McLuhana, which was prized in 2016 with the Pierre Savard Award; scientific editor of the first Polish translation of The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan (2017), which is the book recognized by the Polish Sociological Association as the best translation of the year (2018); Visiting Scholar at Concordia University of Edmonton, Canada

There is no document of civilization which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.

Edward S. Curtis
Edward Sheriff Curtis began his photographic career at the turn of the nineteenth century. The first picture of an indigenous North American made by him was the portrait of "Princess Angeline," the daughter of the Chief Sealth of Seattle, who became an inspiration of two female characters in the play by Clements. After receiving financial support, he began multi-annual work on preparing photographs for the twenty-volume publication under the working title American Indians. The first volume was issued in 1907, with introduction written by Theodore Roosevelt (1976), who kindly expressed his appreciation for the work and personality of the photographer: [i]n Mr. Curtis we have both and artist and a trained observer, whose pictures are pictures, not merely photographs; whose work has for more than mere accuracy, because it is truthful. […] He is a close observer, whose qualities of mind and body fit him to make his Collecting visual material, which is often the basis of ethnographic research, sometimes necessarily requires some interference in the existing social reality as well as needs "a series of more or less organized interactions in which the researcher, by causing a reaction with his action (his motion, conversation or just presence), it also evokes data then reduced and recoded to other forms" (Dziewit and Pisarek 2016:14-15). Field work is, therefore, a kind of chain of re-coding, translations, and displacements. Leistner's work, which the artist herself describes as socially and politically engaged, is based primarily on the direct experience of the surrounding reality.
Ocular participation in events allows the creation of original and direct messages that often turn out to be the most valuable to recipients. This is especially true for work related to documenting life of communities which, for various reasons, have found themselves in a new and unusual situation and must now cope with extreme conditions. It is also important what happens to the photos after they are taken: how they will be developed, who will publish them and what their scope will be, as well as how the author of the photo is responsible for it. When commenting on these issues in one of the interviews (2016), the photographer said: I was drawn to photojournalism because of its power to effect political and social change. So I believe the impulse to be a photojournalist is ethical in itself. If you believe this, then you can justify almost anything you do to advance that end.
[…] I think it's unethical to take photojournalistic images and not do anything with them, or just use them as portfolio pieces or for entering contests. There has to be some kind of sustained effort to make the photographs serve a purpose. (Leistner and Battleface 2016) Photography is much more than just taking a picture -there are plenty of details that every professional photographer pays attention to while working, while at the same time trying to create the unique, professional personality, and individual style.

Conclusion
The perception of events or history is usually shaped and modeled by the medium -e.g. photography (as in the case of the discussed project) -and thus can become the result of a more or less conscious process of 'making the reality less real.' Images provided by various media no longer have a documentary guarantee of being real. And even when the recipients consider them to be 'real,' they are only a representation of some virtual events that can be looked at closely, but not as something unique or different from the rest of the viewed contents. This issue is discussed by, among others, Wolfgang Welsch, who in his book titled Grenzgaenge der Aesthetik notes that the difference between reproducing and simulating the reality is becoming less and less clear and is gradually losing its significance. According to Welsch, the reality is increasingly mediated by the media and the difference between re-creating the reality and simulating it is becoming less and less evident and it loses its importance (Welsch 2005:124). It should also be remembered that a sociologist is also a member of the society in which they acquire certain forms of perception and sensitivity. Although they perceive the social world more clearly in a visual aspect than in other ways (various events, phenomena, or social situations), they also attach greater importance to its visual manifestations (Sztompka 2005:21).