Camp Keeper’s Diaries
44 Years with Curtis
A word from the Camp Keeper
Forty-four years is a long time to live with anything. Long enough to stop seeing it the way everyone else does. Long enough to form your own conclusions — about the art, about the market, about what Edward Curtis actually was.
These are my diaries. Personal. Opinionated. Written from the inside.
Entries:
Why I Stopped Calling Him a Documentarian
The world has been voting for over a century — and it keeps choosing the same striking images. Not for the history. For the art.
The Museum Test
Nobody reaches for the history first. Art gets you through the door. History keeps you in the room.
The Day I First Saw the Plates
Sandia Peak. The whole desert spread out below us. Someone laid out several antique copper plates. And something in me just said — these matter.
I Am a Crow and Jeanne Is My Sister
The Heard Museum. A docent crying on a stool. And how I became an official member of the Crow family.
How to Ruin a Tribal Sale
We spent a year getting to the final meeting. Then a woman in buckskin walked in and killed the whole deal with one question about a cactus.
How Not to Publish a Book
We financed a book, got sued, acquired a stake in the lawsuit against ourselves, and watched it collapse. The plates were fine. They had been through worse.
Nabobs of Negativism
What the experts said about our plates in 1982. What the market said forty-four years later. Two stories. The same result.
Where Have the Plates Gone?
2,234 plates were created. The Camp Keeper knows where every one of them went.