The North American Indian. The Complete Portfolios

Shut, it is a slab. Opened, it releases something stranger: hundreds of copper-toned photogravures printed in the warm, velvety ink Curtis fought to keep when cheaper halftone would have been easier and worse. This edition honors the original portfolios, plate after plate at a size that lets you read the weave of a basket and the grain of a face. What you are holding is twenty years of one obsession, a tripod, boxes of glass plates, a wagon of borrowed regalia, compressed into a single volume you can barely lift.

It is worth pausing on the printing, because it is the reason to own this rather than a folder of scans. Photogravure holds a tonal range that ordinary halftone crushes, laying down continuous ink so shadow reads as depth instead of soot. TASCHEN reproduces the plates near the scale of the originals, on paper that carries the warm brown-black Curtis chose, so a sky reads as weather and a blanket reads as wool. The medium was half the message, and here it survives intact.

The scope defies belief. Between 1900 and 1930, Curtis made some 40,000 negatives across more than eighty peoples, published in twenty volumes with these twenty accompanying portfolios, bankrolled in part by J. P. Morgan and blessed by Theodore Roosevelt. The stated aim was to record Native American life whole before it vanished. The ambition was heroic. The premise was the poison.

As photography, much of it is magnificent. The portrait of Mosa, a young Mohave woman, holds a gaze that generations of viewers have not exhausted. Cañon de Chelly sets a line of riders at the foot of a cliff so vast they read as punctuation. Chief Joseph, Red Cloud, Geronimo near the end of his life: Curtis lit and composed with a patience and tonal command that still rewards anyone working in available light and shadow. The landscapes hold their own beside the faces; a mesa at dawn or a canoe cutting still water shows the same feel for weight, distance, and quiet.

Then you learn how the pictures were made. Curtis carried wigs, costumes, and props from tribe to tribe, dressed his subjects in a borrowed past, and posed ceremonies that were already memory or never quite as he staged them. He retouched the present out of the frame, most infamously erasing a clock from between two Piegan men so the lodge would look untouched by the century around it. Historians have documented all of this at length. The romantic project had a name, the vanishing race, and it cast living, adapting peoples as doomed relics for a white audience's mourning.

Both truths sit in the same plates. These are real people, many of them named, who sat for a photographer and were wrapped in a fiction he arranged around them. Some of their descendants treasure these as the only likeness of a great-grandparent; others resent the costume drama imposed on their history. The images are evidence and invention in one frame, and looking at them honestly means never fully trusting them. Neither reading cancels the other.

This is where the work turns useful to anyone making portraits now. Every decision Curtis made, the wardrobe, the backdrop, what to include and what to erase, is an argument about who the sitter really is, and the camera lends every such argument an authority it has not earned. He is the extreme case of a temptation present in every session: to improve the truth in the direction of a better story. The lesson is not condemnation from a safe distance; it is recognizing the same impulse in your own sessions and deciding, each time, how far to let it run.

Close it, and the weight settling back into your hands is also the weight of the contradiction. The most beautiful record of Native North America ever printed is also among the most quietly falsified, and it is not one gram less magnificent for that. Hold both as you turn the plates, the companion portfolio edition waiting on the same shelf, and the work becomes more revealing about how much a picture can be made to lie, and still move you, than any honest photograph could manage. A slab, yes. Also a mirror.