Short Nights Of The Shadow Catcher - Plot & Excerpts
Karl Kernberger, a photographer with eclectic taste and a love of the Southwest, traveled east to have a look. Downstairs in the venerable Lauriat’s bookstore he picked his way through an enormous cache of the Indian work of Edward S. Curtis. The owner, Charles E. Lauriat Jr., had survived the sinking of the Lusitania by a German U-boat in 1915, an act of war that killed 1,198 people. His ongoing passion was for rare books, and he had no better find than the Curtis material he had bought for $1,000 from the Morgan Library during the Depression. Lauriat was an enthusiastic seller of this work, reassembling volumes into complete sets and retailing individual pictures, but his death in 1937 put an end to widespread dissemination. The images, the many bound books and loose plates, gathered dust until Kernberger’s arrival in the early 1970s. At the same time, mainstream America was embracing Indians as never before. Some of the enthusiasm was trendy and silly, but much of the reappraisal amounted to a fresh, more nuanced and humane narrative of the first people.
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