The Gift of the Face
Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian
By Shamoon Zamir
352 pp., 6.125 x 9.25, 10 color plates., 49 halftones, notes, bibl., index
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Paperback ISBN: 978-1-4696-5911-4
Published: February 2020 -
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-4696-1175-4
Published: August 2014 -
eBook ISBN: 978-1-4696-1176-1
Published: August 2014
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- Hardcover $45.00
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This radical reassessment is presented as a series of close readings that explore the relationship of aesthetics and ethics in photography. Zamir's richly illustrated study resituates Curtis's work in Native American studies and in the histories of photography and visual anthropology.
About the Author
Shamoon Zamir is Professor of Literature and Art History at New York University Abu Dhabi.
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Reviews
“[Zamir’s] analysis is often novel and compelling.”--Journal of American History
"Insightful and persuasive…a valuable contribution to several disciplines."--Native American and Indigenous Studies
"An important and significant new contribution to the scholarship of Native American studies, and also to anthropology, American history, photography, and the study of visual culture." --ARLIS/NA Reviews
“Bold and original.”--Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute
“A fascinating re-evaluation of the ways (post-)modern scholarship has been reading Edward S. Curtis’s The North American Indian, a turning point for all of us who firmly believe in the assessment that images do not hold one single fixed meaning. And it is certainly a must for scholars and students in the fields of Visual Cultural Studies, Native American Studies, Anthropology, American History, Art History, and American Studies more generally.”-- Karsten Fitz, Universität Passau
”The consistent presence of Native agency is brought stunningly to light by Zamir's often brilliant analyses. Against an all-too-frequent nihilism in postcolonial studies, Zamir offers a more nuanced pathway to reassessing Curtis's monumental achievement-however flawed ethically and ethnographically it may be-in the history of intercultural interpretation.”-- Peter M. Whiteley, American Museum of Natural History, New York, in Dialectical Anthropology