The Shadow Catcher

In preparation, Edward depleted his bank account on new cameras and equipment and a new wardrobe and borrowed several hundred dollars more to have custom leather trunks and luggage made to transport his portable laboratory.

“I will make more than a hundred times this money back,” he told Clara to counter her concerns. “Official photographer! Everyone involved will want to buy my photographs of this experience — Harriman’s a millionaire! — and if we have to miss a payment to the bank and keep the children’s piano teacher waiting for her money, then so be it.”

“I will never keep a piano teacher waiting for her money,” Clara pledged.

And she didn’t — she found ways to economize — but still: Edward’s expectations of an economic windfall from the journey proved to be unfounded.

And a harbinger of how his expectations, his tendency toward grandiosity, would fail to deliver the anticipated “gold” at the end of those rainbows again and again. Mt. Rainier had led to Grinnell who had led to Harriman who would lead to Teddy Roosevelt — a chain of surrogate, older brothers — who would lead Edward to J.P. Morgan who would advance him seventy-five thousand dollars — a future sum the future Edward enthusiastically expected Morgan to earn back from the future sale of all those future photographs. He would squander Morgan’s money, in part, on custom clothes and custom camping gear, on Italian printing papers more exquisite and valuable than any that Da Vinci had, and he would end up signing over all his copyrights to Morgan as a consequence.

He did not foresee, in 1899, that a group of men of the caliber that Harriman had summoned would bring cameras of their own, that they would show up with what he termed “push-button apparatuses,” easily portable Kodak box cameras supplied with easy rolls of negative film, and enjoy the experience of taking spontaneous pictures, themselves, snap shots, from their own points of view. Although Harriman had ordered a private folio edition of seven hundred printings from Edward at the completion of the expedition, he never reimbursed the cost, and Edward was left scrambling to recover from the debt but also drowning in expensive prints of Inuit villages and rugged ice that no one seemed to want.

Clara tried to be supportive, but Edward couldn’t understand why anyone would prefer to have a Kodak quick-and-easy photographic record over what amounted to a lasting work of handmade art. His portraits and landscapes were “painterly,” he knew that — that was his purposeful effect, an effect he tried for over the crisper images of, say, Asahel, whose photographs were often sharp enough to slice through steak. The question of where photography was going, what it was, was the leading subject of the journals he subscribed to — the avant-garde coming from New York City and the Photo Secessionists led by a Mr. Alfred Stieglitz who propounded the theory that a photograph should be. That it should be a thing-in-and-of-itself, like a sonata or a poem, not something that appeared, self-consciously, to have been produced through the mechanics of an apparatus. The East Coast journal, overseen by Stieglitz, was called Camera Notes while the West Coast journal, to which Edward frequently contributed, was called Camera Craft—a distinction between theory on the one coast, and craft on the other, which more or less summarized the East Coast elitist view that photographers out West were not only provincial, but uninteresting to boot.

Edward thought the Stieglitz point of view was junk, though Clara championed it.

“I’m not convinced,” was his final verdict whenever they discussed it. “A photograph shouldn’t be, it should tell you what some thing is.”

He worried, in light of the Harriman expedition debt, that his photographs weren’t interesting. He worried that his focus, that the subjects that he chose, were falling short of capturing the public’s interest. So he was wary when Bird Grinnell wrote to ask if Edward would accompany him on a journey to Montana that next summer to be among the few white men invited to attend the Plains Indian Sun Dance.

“I am loath to bring my camera,” Edward wrote back, in acceptance.

“But you must,” Grinnell responded.