Where would you go if you could experience a place during a different era? I would step into Edward Curtis's great photographic tome of Native American culture and disappear if I could! His portraits of American Indian peoples west of the Mississippi are sometimes criticized for presenting a romantic view of their way of life, but he recognized that is was rapidly disappearing and made a conscious choice to record it for posterity. I would love to step into any one of these images, meet those people, and see the American West before it was developed. September 2013 |