Camp Keeper’s Diary
The Day I First Saw the Plates
Listen to the Camp Keeper
I didn’t come to Edward Curtis through art. I came to him through copper.
It was the early 1980s. I wasn’t an art man — I was a financial one. My whole career had been about one thing: learning to recognize value where other people didn’t see it. That’s the trade. You look at something everyone else is walking past and you ask, quietly, is there more here than they think?
One day I got a call. Come out to New Mexico, look at something. So I flew out, and we rode to the top of the mountain — the tramway above Albuquerque, Sandia Peak, the whole desert spread out below us. And someone laid out a set of old copper plates.
I want to be honest about what I knew that day: nothing. I’d never heard of Edward Curtis. I knew nothing about photography as an art, nothing about The North American Indian, nothing about the history or the cultures of the people in those images. Not one thing.
But I knew objects. I’d spent my life around things that were built, and you develop a feel for when something has been made with care — when it will hold, when it will matter, when the market has it wrong.
I looked at those plates and something in me just said: these matter. There’s real value here.
I couldn’t have told you why. I didn’t have the word “artist” yet, or “photogravure,” or any of the language I’d spend the next forty years learning. I just knew.
That was the beginning. Forty-four years ago, on a mountaintop, before I understood a single thing about the art.
Everything I know about Curtis came after that moment — not before it. Maybe that’s why, all these years later, I still believe the object comes first.