Watching the Dancers

Edward S. Curtis

1906

Classification
Photograph
Museum
Wikimedia Commons
Credit line
This image is available from the United States Library of Congress's Prints and Photographs division under the digital ID cph.3b27163. This tag does not indicate the copyright status of the attached work. A normal copyright tag is still…
Rights
Public domain, as the museum states it.
Who can see it
Tweens profiles and older: its subjects are known and suit older children. How works are placed

View at the Wikimedia Commons

About this work

"Watching the Dancers – From Copyright Photograph 1906 by E.S. Curtis – Photogravure Suffolk Eng. Co. Boston"

Four young Hopi girls have their backs to the camera. Wearing traditional holiday dress they are watching dancers from a nearby rooftop. The adobe structure is simple, yet sturdy. — This is a restored version. The process is described in steps in the upload history, starting with a jpeg converted from the tif file of the original.

Description by Edward Curtis: "A group of girls on the topmost roof of Walpi Pueblo, looking down into the plaza." – "The Hopi reservation was established in 1882, but until the beginning of the twentieth century the people were practically independent of governmental authority. Since that time official supervision, assistance, and sometimes blundering interference in harmless religious and personal customs, has become more and more effective, and the result is the gradual abandonment of the old order. In 1906 not a maid at the East mesa kept her hair in the picturesque squash-blossom whorls indicative of the unmarried state."[1]

LOC Summary: Four Hopi women on the topmost roof of Walpi Pueblo looking down at the plaza.

Four women wrapped in…