1899/1901. Three images by Curtis taken during the Harriman Alaska Expedition of 1899. Entitled "Members of the Expedition on St. Matthew Island" and published in 1901 in Harriman Alaska Expedition. Three images, on one sheet, show botanist Frederick Coville and naturalist William Brewer; author John Burroughs and naturalist John Muir; and geologists Benjamin Emerson and Grove Karl Gilbert. The credit line reads "Photographs by Curtis"; the printer line reads "John Andrew & Son." 6-5/8" x 10". The Harriman Expedition was a major scientific project of its time: a wealthy philanthropist/adventurer gathered what amounted to a superstar team of scientists, artists, photographers and naturalists to explore the Alaska coast from Seattle to Siberia and back. Edward Curtis, who had primarily been a portrait photographer for Seattle's upper classes in the early stages of his career, had developed a friendship with George Bird Grinnell, an expert in Native American cultures who had been invited on the Harriman expedition. As a result of their connection, Curtis was invited along as a photographer. It was as a result of this trip and a later trip he took with Grinnell to photograph the Blackfeet Indians in 1900 that Curtis developed the idea for his massive photography project to document the North American Indians while it was still possible, a venture that took decades and essentially destroyed his life but left as a legacy one of the greatest photographic achievements ever, and was also one of the greatest ethnographic projects ever undertaken involving American Indian tribes, creating not only a photographic record but an aural one of languages and oral traditions at risk of being lost forever. The Burroughs and Muir image here is a particularly fortuitous one: they were among the most famous participants in the expedition -- two of the best-known naturalists in America, known as "the two Johnnies" to the other participants: there are relatively few images of the two of them together, however. A wisp of edge sunning, else fine. [#029581] SOLD