'Sacred Legacy'

Sacred Legacy showcases the work of photographer and ethnographer Edward Curtis, whose historical photographs of the native people of North America offers a rare glimpse into a world that is better known to most of us through dramatic fictional accounts of the old West in cinema and television where the Indian exists as the counterpoint to the cowboy. In the world built by Curtis' camera – or at least in the selection of photographs on display – Western man has still to interrupt these culturally rich lives lived in harmony with their natural landscapes, even at the end of the nineteenth century.

Curtis' lovingly reproduced images reflect both the detachment of a documenter and the aesthetic wonder of an artist in love with his subjects. But a little more than a century after they were taken, they are also filled with an overwhelming sense of sadness at all that has been lost, not just for the indigenous tribes of what is now North America, but for all of us in our relentless quest to usurp nature.