It's possible the Great American ethnographer was a photographer. His name was Edward S. Curtis, and he is the subject of Timothy Egan's heartbreaking biography, Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher, for Curtis's mighty artistic struggle came to naught during his lifetime. Egan's previous books include the National Book Award winning The Worst Hard Time (2006) and The Big Burn (2009), among other tomes about the West. Simply put, Curtis (1868-1952) took pictures -- thousands of them -- of Indians, and was obsessed with them, in fact.
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