Author: Paul Henley

Edward S. Curtis is most remembered  today for his vast, twenty-volume series of photographs, The North American Indian, published between 1907 and 1930.

But relatively early in his career, he also made a number of films of ethnographic interest, among the Navajo (1904) and the Hopi (1904 and 1906) of Arizona, and the Kwakwaka‘wakw (1914) of the Canadian Northwest Pacific coast.

Texts: Gidley 1982, Evans and Glass 2014, Henley 2020: 90-99.

Originally from Pennsylvania, Ellsworth Kolb arrived at the Grand Canyon in 1901 and his brother Emery came the following year.

Initially, they made  a living by taking photographs of the tourist visitors to the canyon who had begun to arrive on the newly established Santa Fe railroad. They then moved on to taking photographs of the Canyon itself, and selling these to the tourists too. In 1906, they set up the Kolb Studio in a wooden house at the head of the Bright Angel Trail.

The brothers also made films, which, like their photographs, were mainly concerned with the natural environment of the Grand Canyon. However, they made a contribution to the canon of early films of ethnographic interest when they filmed the Snake Dance ceremony at the nearby Hopi village of Wàlpi in August 1911, returning to do so again in August 1913.

A film that combines footage from both performances of the ceremony is held at Northern Arizona University, in the Emery Kolb archive. It is possible that at least some of the material from 1913 is included in an unattributed film held by the Library of Congress, Hopi Indians Dance for Theodore Roosevelt (1913).

In 1924, Ellsworth left and went to live in Los Angeles. But Emery remained with his family at Kolb Studio until his death in 1976.

The Kolb Studio, now operated by the US National Park Service, stands at the head of the Bright Angel Trail to this day.

Text: Lyon 1988: 242, 262.

Under his original family name, Milner, during the interwar years, Victor Miller was a leading Hollywood cinematographer, best known for his work for the German-American director Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947).

However, at the beginning of his career, when still only 20 years of age and working as a newsreel cameraman for Pathe’s Weekly, Miller contributed to the canon of films of ethnographic interest in the form of footage shot at the 1913 Snake Dance ceremony at the Hopi village of Wàlpi, Arizona. This is archived in the Library of Congress under the misleading title Hopi Indians Dance for Theodore Roosevelt.

Despite his youth, Miller was already an experienced cinematographer: the previous winter, he had shot the fictional feature film Hiawatha, made in collaboration with the American Museum of Natural History, which was based on the epic Longfellow poem and directed by Frank E. Moore. Although not strictly ethnographic, this film had involved 150 Native actors, mainly Sioux, Ojibwa and Menomonee.

Later in 1913, he would win plaudits in the cinema industry press for filming during the Colorado Coalfield miners’ strike, even when bullets were flying. This is when the portrait of him at the head of this entry was taken.

In 1916, he travelled to what was then the Belgian Congo (today the Democratic Republic of Congo and formerly Zaire). The overall reason for this trip is unclear, but a report in the cinema industry press suggests that during his travels through the country, he shot some sequences of local customary practices.