By Elizabeth Guheen, Director and Chief Curator
Famed sheepman Charlie Bair’s friendship with the photographer Edward Curtis began in Montana but they also frequently saw each other in Los Angeles where the Bair family spent Christmas at the Biltmore Hotel and where Curtis had a studio. One story tells of Marguerite and Alberta Bair, then in their early teens, running all over the hotel visiting Curtis, and the studios of Joseph H. Sharp and Charlie Russell. They wanted a photograph of their father and conspired with Curtis to get Charlie into his studio under some pretense. That photograph is now in the Bair Collection.By the time Curtis finished the first five volumes of his twenty-volume series, The North American Indian, he had run out of money. To help him out, Bair bought a set of the first five volumes. Years later Marguerite and Alberta Bair would keep the set under a bed in the ranch house—not a bad conservation decision given the extreme light sensitivity of the photographs printed on delicate Gampi tissue paper. Eventually, the volumes made their way into the state-of-the-art museum built adjacent to the house in 2011. Each volume consists of two parts: a book of detailed ethnographic information and biographies about various tribes accompanied by some small photogravures, and a portfolio of large, individual photogravures.
In all, Curtis photographed almost 100 tribes, mostly in Montana and Arizona. While often criticized for substituting cultural objects and costumes as props in place of some modern object, removing a clock or a wristwatch, for example, Curtis still succeeded in a creating a powerful record of portraits and indigenous landscapes that most concede transcends this criticism. He recorded the information he gathered not just in texts and photographs -he made films and sound recordings, including over 10,000 wax cylinders on American Indian languages and music. He also recorded tribal mythologies (some are included in the books) and the history of individual tribes in the words of their elders.
From June 1st through the end of October, the Bair Museum is presenting The Shadow Catcher, twenty-five original photogravures drawn from all five Bair Collection volumes. Visit the museum at 2751 MT Hwy 294 in Martinsdale. For more information, call 406-572-3314 or check out their website at bairfamilymuseum.org.