Edward S. Curtis
Edward S. Curtis (1868-1952) left behind a successful Seattle portrait business to embark on an epic photographic and anthropological project: The North American Indian, a 20-volume set of books of photographs and essays documenting more than 70 tribes.
See a selection of Curtis’s images from the Smithsonian, here.
https://www.si.edu/spotlight/edward-sheriff-curtis
The Library of Congress houses over a thousand of Curtis’s images. You can visit the collection, read about Curtis, and search the images, here.
https://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/ecur/background.html
Curtis’s photographs of Native Americans raise ethical issues about photography as a representational process. Read an essay on those issues, with examples from his photos, here.