Indian Whalers Stripping Their Prey at Neah Bay 1910

Asahel Curtis made this photograph, "Indian Whalers Stripping Their Prey at Neah Bay", and the sepia tones give it a feeling of a distant memory. I'm thinking about the materiality of this image: the gelatin silver process, the paper. It’s so different from paint, but like painting it captures a moment, an idea. I keep imagining the act of the whale hunters: their focused movements, the weight of the whale, and the shared labor involved. What was Curtis thinking when he made this photograph? Was he trying to document a culture, capture a moment in history, or something else entirely? I like to think of artists as being in conversation with each other across time. Curtis’s work reminds me a bit of some painters who are interested in representing communal activity. Ultimately, both painting and photography offer ways of seeing and experiencing the world, capturing moments of life. There is no single reading. These images spark questions and open doors to all sorts of reflections.