In the early 20th century, within the context of an ever-increasing proliferation of (visual) objects, of their forms, functions and ways of circulation, Edward S. Curtis’s 20-volume encyclopaedia of North American Indian life is both paradigmatic and unique, as it stands at the crossroad of multiple –sometimes competing – cultural dynamics. Though Curtis’s Indians photographs are framed and contained by a pseudo-scientific apparatus, they are only marginally ethnographic. They rather appear as instruments of “symbolic intercession”, providing an outlet for the archival impulses of the period, thus participating in the overall process of history-making and memorialization. Yet, in spite of the collective, nationalist and largely instrumental value and worth attributed to the photographic artefacts, they also strike us as symptoms of anxiety, locus of melancholy, not to say poetic sites of reflexivity. We will focus on the complex, double-edged status of photographic objets –the photograph as object and the object in the photograph – which can serve as stable surfaces of national inscription but also as forces of disruption, questioning the very authority of the author by dint of their mute, a-human eloquence
