Edward Curtis (1868-1952) American, Rare Silver Gelatin Print from 1923 The Ten Commandments. Original gelatin silver, double weight, satin finish photo. Taken in 1923 during the photographer's short-lived Hollywood career on the set of Cecil B. DeMille's (1881-1959) first version of the sweeping Old Testament epic, the image shows an actress dressed as a slave girl posing demurely before an Egyptian set piece in the desert. Handwriting in pen on the open back side of the thin, sealed, matted box. 

Provenance: Acquired from the estate of Brunell, a silent movie producer. 

Overall Size: 15 x 12 x 1/2 in. 

Sight Size: 8 x 6 in. 

American photographer and ethnologist Edward Sheriff Curtis (1868-1952) dedicated his life to documenting Native American tribes, capturing over 40,000 photographs and 10,000 audio recordings across more than 80 indigenous nations. After launching his early career in Seattle, he gained national recognition and secured crucial financial backing from financier J.P. Morgan in 1906 to produce a monumental 20-volume series titled The North American Indian. Beyond print photography, Curtis ventured into cinema by directing In the Land of the Head Hunters (1914), which featured an all-indigenous cast but ultimately failed to generate financial success. Despite his immense artistic dedication, Curtis struggled with personal hardship, facing a bitter divorce, bankruptcy, and losing the rights to his life’s work before dying in relative obscurity in 1952. While modern scholars acknowledge that his romanticized, staged compositions sometimes erased contemporary Western influences to project a “vanishing race” narrative, his expansive collection remains a vital historical archive of indigenous lore, music, and traditions. Today, Curtis’s work is widely celebrated and studied, with complete original sets fetching high values at auction and preserved in institutions such as the Library of Congress and Northwestern University. 

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