Art Lovers Book Club: The Short Night of the Shadow Catcher by Timothy Egan

Edward Curtis was thirty-two years old in 1900 when he began pursuing his idea to capture on film the continent’s original inhabitants before the old ways disappeared.

Curtis spent the next three decades traveling from the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon to the Acoma on a high mesa in New Mexico to the Salish in the rugged Northwest rain forest, documenting the stories and rituals of more than eighty tribes.

Eventually Curtis took more than 40,000 photographs, preserved 10,000 audio recordings, and is credited with making the first narrative documentary film.