EDWARD S. CURTIS. Plate 469 Smelt Fisher - Trinidad Yurok, 1923. 15.5x11.9" photogravure on 17.6x12.8" Holland Van Gelder paper mounted tattered paper envelope remnants. Printed 1924. From Portfolio 13, Northern California & Oregon, of The North American Indian. Inscribed in red pencil on print recto: Plate # 469; in pencil: The Smelt Fisher - Trinidad Yurok / From Copyright Photograph 1923 by E.S. Curtis / Photogravure Suffolk Eng. Co. Cambridge Mass.; various numerical notations and printer's notes in pencil.

Curtis wrote about this: "The surf-net used in smelt-fishing is a bag suspended on two diverging poles. At the bottom of the net proper is a restricted opening into a long net-bag, which is held in the fisherman's hand. Dipping and raising his net, he allows the imprisoned smelts to fall down into the bag, where they are securely held until he has enough to justify him in going ashore to empty it."

To make the photogravure prints from the negative, Curtis created a positive that he would edit on, and then working with the great photogravure printing companies in Boston, John Andrew & Son that became Suffolk Engraving Company they made over 2200 copper plates from which the photogravures were to be printed. Each plate was stored in an envelope that had a Holland Van Gelder Photogravure attached to it of the copper plate it housed as well as written title information that was to be engraved into the plates and printed on the prints. There are 29 Envelope plate photogravures offered in various lots in this auction. The envelopes themselves only partially survived, tattered and torn.

Fair. Print surface is dirty, creased, spotted with printer's ink, and has tears throughout. The envelope is torn and fragile.