In 1900, Edward S. Curtis (1868 – 1952) undertook the momentous task of documenting American Indian cultures across the United States. Over the next thirty years, he took over 40,000 photographs and collected information about more than eighty tribes, ranging from the Inuit people of the far north to the Hopi people of the Southwest. Curtis assembled this material into twenty lavishly illustrated text volumes, each accompanied by a folio of approximately thirty-eight printed, hand-pulled photogravures