Watching the Dancers | Edward Curtis

Waiting for the Dancers, My Morning View, Santa Fe Studio, New Mexico

When I first saw Waiting for the Dancers a 1906 photograph by Edward Curtis in Carl Toth’s Photo History Class I attended at the University of Michigan years ago, it nearly took my breath away. It is a beautiful image of four young Hopi girls wearing traditional feast day regalia. They are gathered on a sturdy adobe wall watching the dancers from a nearby rooftop. According to Curtis’s notes about the photograph, “The Hopi reservation was established in 1882, but until the beginning of the twentieth century the people were practically independent of governmental authority. Since that time official supervision, assistance, and sometimes blundering interference in harmless religious and personal customs, has become more and more effective, and the result is the gradual abandonment of the old order. In 1906 not a maid at the East mesa kept her hair in the picturesque squash-blossom whorls indicative of the unmarried state.”

This early morning view of Curtis’s photograph in my studio was made while sitting at my old work table where I sometimes like to drink coffee, listen to music and reflect. I have always believed that a good image (great image!?) should reveal something to grab your attention and cause you to stay a while and linger. It shouldn’t however reveal everything about itself at once. There should be something there that is deeper— something that calls you back again and again and reveals some new fragment—a surprise perhaps that enlarges your understanding and causes you to contemplate and appreciate it even more. The painter Wassily Kandinsky said,

The true work of art is born from the 'artist': a mysterious, enigmatic, and mystical creation. It detaches itself from him, it acquires an autonomous life, becomes a personality, an independent subject, animated with a spiritual breath, the living subject of a real existence of being.

Watching the Dancers has continued to exist in my life and capture my imagination for over forty years now and there are days when I study it, that it still takes my breath away.

Watching the Dancers, Walpi Pueblo, Arizona, 1906
by Edward S. Curtis