Library hosts traveling photography exhibit

Hot Springs County Library is hosting a traveling photography exhibit showcasing the work of Edward S. Curtis through April 30. Pieces from Curtis’s The North American Indian, a grand work that provides a permanent record of 80 North American tribes, will be featured in the exhibit.

Curtis produced the unique American record at great personal sacrifice. Beginning in 1898, he travelled the American West from the Rio Grande to the Arctic Circle. Working with written accounts, photographic images and sound recordings, Curtis gathered and arranged the ethnographic data and took more than 40,000 photographs using only natural light. The massive work was published between 1907 and 1930. The elegant volumes with their stately folio plates were printed on the finest handmade papers of the time. Sadly, the Great Depression contributed to weak sales of the finished volumes, and only 214 of the 500 subscriptions were sold.

The exhibit is funded by a grant from Wyoming Community Foundation’s Carol McMurry Donor Advised Fund in partnership with the McCracken Research Library at the Buffalo Bill Center of the West in Cody, which holds a rare complete set of “The North American Indian.”