ABOUT
THE ARTISTS
Edward Sheriff Curtis
“While primarily a photographer, I do not see or think photographically; hence the story of Indian life will not be told in microscopic detail, but rather will be presented as a broad and luminous picture. " – Edward S Curtis
Born in 1868 near Whitewater, Wisconsin, Edward Sheriff Curtis became one of America’s finest photographers and ethnologists. When the Curtis family moved to Port Orchard, Washington in 1887, Edward’s gift for photography led him to an investigation of the Indians living on the Seattle waterfront. His portrait of Chief Seattle’s daughter, Princess Angeline, won Curtis the highest award in a photographic contest.
Having become well known for his work with the Indians, Curtis participated in the 1899 Harriman expedition to Alaska as one of two official photographers. He then accompanied George Bird Grinell, editor of “Forest and Stream, on a trip to northern Montana. There they witnessed the deeply sacred Sundance of the Piegan and Blackfeet tribes. Traveling on horseback, with their pack horses trailing behind, they emerged from the mountains to view the valley floor massed with over a thousand teepees, an awesome sight to Curtis and one that transformed his life. Everything fell into place at that moment: it was clear to him that he was to record, with pen and camera, the life of the North American Indian.
Edward S. Curtis devoted the next 30 years to photographing and documenting over eighty tribes west of the Mississippi, from the Mexican border to northern Alaska. His project won support from such prominent and powerful figures as President Theodore Roosevelt and J. Pierpont Morgan. From 1911-1914 Curtis also produced and directed a silent film based on the mythology of the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest.
For more information about the history of Edward Curtis visit:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_S._Curtis
Laton Alton Huffman
“Kind Fate had it that I should be Post Photographer with the Army during the Indian Campaigns close following the annihilation of Custer’s command. This Yellowstone-Big Horn Country was then unpenned by wire, and unspoiled by railway, dam, and ditch. Eastman had not yet invented the Kodak but thanks be there was the old wet plate, the collodion bottle and bath. I made photographs with crude home-made cameras from saddle and in log shack I saved something.
Round about us came the army of buffalo hunters - red men and white - were waging the final war of extermination upon the last great herds of American Bison seen upon the continent. Then came the cattleman, the “trail boss” with his army of cowboys, and the great cattle round-up. Then the army of railroad builders. That – the railway – was the fatal coming. One looked about and said: “This is the last West.” It was not so. There was no more West after that. It was a dream and a forgetting. A chapter forever closed.” – Laton A. Huffman
L.A. Huffman was appointed post photographer at Fort Keogh in Miles City, Montana in the late 1800’s. It was an unpaid position, but it provided an opportunity to make and sell photographs. His photographs are not only valued for their historical significance, but also their artistic quality.
For more information visit:
www.lahuffman.com/biography.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laton_Alton_Huffman
Douglas Kenyon
The Two Rivers Collection is a grouping of images primarily from my father’s personal collection. My father, Douglas Kenyon, had an eye for great art. He had the good fortune to be on the forefront of modern photography when he became a student at the Art Institute of Chicago in 1960.
He soon rose to the position of Chief Conservator for Prints and Drawings in 1967, and it was in that position that he routinely worked with the “modern masters” of photography: Ansel Adams, Robert Frank, Bruce Davidson, and Walker Evans, just to name a few.
One of the exciting discoveries that my father made was in 1970 while on a trip through Montana. He happened upon the photographic estate of Laton A. Huffman, whose images of the vanishing west dated from the 1880’s and covered the span of history that included the Native Americans (Sioux and Northern Cheyenne), frontiersman, the decimation of the great bison herds, the cowboys, and the massive herds of cattle. Realizing the importance of this collection, he purchased the estate and compiled a “museum exhibition” of 100 of the best images and took it on tour for the next four years to many exhibitions and museums.
He continued to collect images that he was passionate about throughout his life. When the giclee´ method was developed, it provided a means to reproduce these beloved images with the type of clarity and resolution that had before never been possible.
I am very proud to be able to offer my father’s images in this collection. I hope you will enjoy them as much as I have.
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– Christine Kenyon
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