Portfolio XVI, Plate 574: Paguate

The photograph captures a desolate landscape where weathered stone buildings sit atop a hill, suggesting former habitation or storage facilities now in ruin. Below, thin rows of hardy plants and a winding path convey a sense of quiet persistence in an otherwise empty environment, hinting at the intersection of human settlement and the harshness of the surrounding desert.

Curtis employed early 20th‑century photographic processes, likely a glass‑plate negative, to render fine tonal gradations across the scene. The composition balances vertical elements of the hill and structures with horizontal expanses of land, while the soft, pale sky creates a subdued atmosphere that emphasizes texture over dramatic lighting.

Created during Curtis’s multi‑decade project to document Indigenous peoples of the United States, the plate was later acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art, where it remains part of the museum’s photography holdings. Its inclusion in Portfolio XVI reflects Curtis’s systematic approach to cataloguing varied regional settings.

The image was taken at Paguate, a settlement historically associated with the Pueblo peoples of New Mexico. In the early 1900s, such sites were undergoing significant change, and Curtis’s work aimed to preserve visual evidence of architecture and landscapes that were rapidly disappearing under federal policies and modernization.