Shamoon Zamir's latest book, The Gift of the Face: Portraiture and Time in Edward S. Curtis's The North American Indian, offers vindication of Curtis, both the man and his works, from what the author argues has been several decades of misguided and deprecatory scholarship . According to Zamir, Christopher Lyman's The Vanishing Race and Other Illusions (1982) launched what is now an “entrenched … view of Curtis and his work as representative of an essentially colonialist view of Native American cultures” (284 n. 14). Scholarship on Curtis, Zamir contends, has too easily employed ideological criticisms and spent little time examining the photographer's visual aesthetic.

Euro-American Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868–1952) began a twenty-three-year venture to document all of the important tribes of the United States and Alaska around 1900. Published between 1907 and 1930, The North American Indian comprises twenty volumes of some two thousand photographs interspersed within ethnographic texts. About half of the pictures are portraits. A collaborative endeavor, the work is a product not just of Curtis's efforts, but also of the efforts of a “shifting team of ethnographers, Native American assistants and informants, editors, and technicians.” It was, Zamir affirms, the most ambitious and expensive project in photography ever attempted, or realized since (6).

The period in which Curtis worked was one in which the US recorded its lowest-ever populations of American Indians due to European-introduced diseases, warfare, and disastrous federal assimilatory policies. The anxiety of some Native and non-Native individuals over such substantial human losses and cultural damage inspired efforts to record indigenous faces and knowledge for future generations. It was the project of salvage ethnography that most strongly informs Curtis's work, Zamir contends (11). Yet, quite different from the sharply focussed and evenly lit photographic conventions promoted by a new generation of social scientists, Curtis employed the more painterly pictorialist mode. Zamir invokes the art genre of the photobook to evaluate the atypical creative aspects of The North American Indian. Curtis's pictures, the author asserts, were meant to be engaged in sequences and alongside textual information. Critical to Zamir's thesis is Curtis's expressed intention to augment the dry ethnographic material with the sensual impact of the photographs (250–51, 261)

In order to accommodate an extended and close reading of the photographs in The North American Indian, Zamir studied selected volumes that he felt were most representative of the project's photo-textual practices. In Volume VI, Curtis placed a portrait of a Piegan man holding a medicine pipe amidst a discussion on Piegan pipes’ cultural roles. There is a general rather than direct relation between image and text here. The text never references Curtis's photo, but discusses how the pipes facilitate secular and spiritual relationships, as well as carrying unique identities and histories (43). In Curtis's picture, the man appears to offer the pipe as a gift, as if acting out the significant communal role pipes can play. These choices effectively animate both pipe and man, as well as the surrounding text. Not just illustrations of dusty artifacts or people from a vanished epoch, many of Curtis's photographs embody face-to-face encounters with indigenous vitality in the reservation period.

Zamir's attention to Curtis's design process reveals an inconsistent, rather than essentialized, cultural logic. For example, there are enough appearances of modern objects in the images to raise questions about a distinct plan by Curtis to eradicate all signs of modernity. While he notoriously retouched a photograph to remove a clock from one Piegan tipi interior picture, he ignored safety pins worn prominently on clothing in six different Piegan portraits (75). Further, the inclusion of his subjects’ names, biographies, and sometimes autobiographies in the ethnographic texts problematizes, but does not eliminate, a reading of Curtis's portraits as dehumanized and voiceless ethnographic types (30–31, 123, 155, 182). Additionally, the photographer was not immune to expressions of indigenous cultural doom, but was also capable of great sensitivity to his subjects’ cultural continuity (187, 273). The widely reproduced image “The Vanishing Race – Navajo,” which is the first image in Volume I, is bookended in this same volume by a photograph entitled “Out of the Darkness.” Thus Zamir finds – contrary to the assertions of many previous scholars – that Curtis presents the indigenous future as more unknown and hopeful than ill-fated.

Not all of Zamir's proposals are convincing. His explanation for the clock's erasure in the above-mentioned photograph – because it impeded visual and narrative coherence – is one of the most unsatisfying. The lengthy theoretical discussions and statistics, the laborious treatment of images, and the repeated rebuke of most preceding Curtis scholars may limit the potential readership to an upper-level academic one. Nonetheless, his study makes a compelling contribution to what has always been a conflicted dialogue on the merits and failures of Curtis's works. By bringing renewed focus to Curtis's creative achievements, Zamir demonstrates the potential of The North American Indian to express indigenous points of view and survival in a formidable historical period (9–10).