Good morning, Whitewater
There is a Common Council meeting at 6:30 p.m. tonight. The agenda for the meeting is available online.
The session tonight includes a State of the City presentation. Later, the meeting will go into closed session regarding the extension of the South Whitewater multi-use trail.
On this day in 1868, from the Wisconsin Historical Society, photographer Edward S. Curtis was born near Whitewater:
On this date Edward Sheriff Curtis was born near Whitewater. As a young boy, he taught himself photography. His family eventually moved to the Puget Sound area of Washington state. He settled in Seattle and opened a photography studio in 1897. A chance meeting on Mount Rainier resulted in Curtis being appointed official photographer on railroad magnate E.H. Harriman’s expedition to Alaska.
Curtis also accompanied George Bird Grinnell, editor of Field and Stream magazine, to Montana in 1900 to observe the Blackfoot Sun Dance. After this, Curtis strove to comprehensively document American Indians through photography, a project that continued for over 30 years. Working primarily with 6 x 8-inch reflex camera, he created over 40,000 sepia-toned images. His work attracted national attention, most notably from Theodore Roosevelt and J. Pierpont Morgan, whose family contributed generously to his project.
His monumental work, The North American Indian, was eventually printed in 20 volumes with associated portfolios. Curtis’ work included portraits, scenes of daily life, ceremonies, architecture and artifacts, and landscapes. His photographs have recently been put online by the Library of Congress. [Source: Dictionary of Wisconsin Biography, SHSW 1960, pg. 892]
The Library of Congress has an online exhibit, one of many online, entitled Edward S. Curtis in Context. Curtis’s photographs are often haunting, despite the now-stilted original commentary that sometimes accompanied them.
Two of Curtis’s public domain photographs appear below — White Man Runs Him and Mandan Man Overlooking the Missouri River (c. 1908).
