The Hasselblad Center proudly presents one of the most imposing private collections of fine quality Edward S. Curtis photographs. "The North American Indian" is one of the most significant and controversial representations of traditional American Indian culture ever produced.

Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) grew up in an area where there were also Native Americans. Little was left of their original cultures since most Indians had been forced into reservations. Curtis, who had acquired a reputation through photographs of landscapes and portraits of Native Indians, felt the need to documenting the last remains of the "vanishing race". He approached his project with an almost maniacal ambition, starting to gather significant information on different areas of Indian life and lore before he began the actual field work. This depth of understanding was crucial to his success. He created an irreplaceable photographic and ethnographic record of more than eighty different tribes and managed to complete a twenty-volume standard reference work entitled The North American Indian (1907-1930), not only paralleled artistic and historic achievement, but a watershed in publishing history as well. The quest would last for over thirty years and he recorded languages, social patterns, legends and religious ceremonies as well as 40,000 photographs.

By the time Curtis carried out his extensive documentation, the Native American population had been halved through diseases and the hardship of living on reservations. This image was never included in Curtis´ impressive work, which instead was a sentimental and romantic representation of the proud Indian.

Some critics still blame Curtis for the fact that this emphasis on the aesthetic and historically romantic aspect of the Indian Nations led him to ignore their actual misery as an oppressed minority in the America of his day. They forget, however, that Curtis was working in a monumental, purely pictorial nineteenth-century tradition, which survived until approximately 1930 with little influence from the emerging New Photography movement, with its more involved journalistic view of social relationships.

Post-colonial thinkers would namely state, that despite good intentions, the representation of the non-Westerners (anthropologists, philosophers and photographers among others) failed in the sense that that did not manage to bridge cultural dividers. This is because the Westerners' preconceptions of the "Other" will always be embedded in all forms of representation. Instead, they argue that portrayals of otherness reinforced the dominance of Western culture.

Curtis´work, however, is still among the most representative photographic documents produced as an anthropological compilation of historical data from the latest century. Although "the North American Indian" was published in a print run of only 257 copies, it is still regarded as one of the most remarkable achievements in the history both of photography and of modern anthropology.

This exhibition is drawn from a private collection created over a thirty-year period by one of the world's foremost Curtis collectors, Christopher Cardozo. Many of these images had never been exhibited before the previous European museum tour.

SACRED LEGACY II allows us to experience the American history - to share a recollection of Native American cultures as they were captured and preserved in time for future generations by Edward S. Curtis when they were on the brink of extinction.