156-7) At the same time that Edward Curtis published his
elegiacal, deliberately composed, sepia photographs of American Indians between 1907 and 1930, which featured as a key image a photograph of a line of Navajo horsemen disappearing into a canyon entitled "The Vanishing Race," early twentieth century ethnography and social reform aimed to document, preserve, and ameliorate the situation of living Indians.
There's plenty more irony here, in
elegiacal treatment that also takes time for playful imagery and many musical interludes.
The
elegiacal, the serious, the ceremonial, do not hold for the Immortals.
What is intriguing here, however, is the possibility that
elegiacal documents about Africans do a kind of deeply politicized race work that would otherwise be protested or prohibited.