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Edward Sheriff Curtis is regarded today as one of the great American photographers. His iconic work The North American Indian took him thirty years to complete and cost him his marriage and his health. As with so many artists he enthused rich and influential patrons - they don't come richer than banker J. Pierpoint Morgan or more influential than President Theodore Roosevelt - but died himself in relative poverty and obscurity. But he left behind the most complete visual record of Native Americans from the Intuit of the far north to the Hopi people of the southwest.

Born near Whitewater, Wisconsin in 1868, he became interested in photography and in 1891, much to his mother's chagrin, he sold the family brickyard, mortgaged the family homestead, and brought half interest in a Seattle photo studio. In 1895 Curtis took his first photos of an Indian: the elderly daughter of Chief Siahl - Seattle - namesake of the city, but it was a chance encounter on Mount Rainier in 1898 that started him on his life's path. He met George Bird Grinnell, editor of Forest and Stream and an authority on American Indians and next year he was named official photographer for an 1899 scientific expedition to Alaska where he was captivated by the native Alaskans.

One year later, in 1900, Edward Curtis found himself sitting on the back of a horse looking over a vast Montana plain from a tall bluff. Next to Curtis was Grinnell, who had been visiting the area for two decades and had invited the photographer to join him. Below, hundreds of Blackfoot, Blood, and Piegan people gathered for their annual Sun Dance. Soon, it all became clear to Curtis: Before the western Indians and their cultures disappeared completely, somebody needed to reach out to these people, gain their confidence, and record their existence. And that is exactly what he did - in twenty volumes published between 1907 and 1930.

"Edward S. Curtis: Visions of the First Americans" is a tribute to the photographer, his work, but above all to the Native Americans he photographed. As Don Gulbrandsen says in his introductory essay on Curtis's life: "The faces stare out at you, images seemingly from an ancient time and from a place far, far away. Their names are just as arresting - Shot in the Hand, Two Moon, Bear's Belly, Raven Blanket - monikers that don't immediately register as human. Yet as you gaze at the faces the humanity becomes apparent, lives filled with dignity but also sadness and loss, representatives of a world that has all but disappeared from our planet."