Link: Timothy Egan on the Life and Work of Edward S. Curtis - NYTimes.com

I’m a third-generation Westerner, so the photographs of Edward S. Curtis have been as much a part of my landscape as a desert mesa or a mountain glacier. I took him for granted: those faces of Native Americans, those everyday tasks, those searing looks from the inside of tepees lit by late daylight. In his pictures, ordinary people look extraordinary. He captured the humanity of the continent’s first inhabitants.