Stinson Beach resident Raven Schauf and her two sisters recently inherited a substantial set of famous images: photogravures of Native Americans taken by the lauded photographer and ethnologist Edward Curtis. Mr. Curtis spent decades in the 19th and 20th centuries taking pictures and recording traditions and languages of native people whose way of life was quickly disappearing. The collection came to Ms. Schauf and her sisters, Amy Schauf and Stacy Madison, by way of their father Neil, a Santa Fe resident who acquired a significant collection of the images over 40 years and died a year and a half ago. Now about two dozen photogravures—created by etching images from glass negatives onto copper plates that are rubbed with ink and pressed onto paper—are hanging in the Stinson Beach Library until the end of January. “Curtis very specifically made this choice because he wanted to use the best technology at the time,” Ms. Schauf, who also showed the images at the San Geronimo Valley Community Center, said of the photogravures. “He wanted to show every crevice in the faces and depict the Native Americans in as detailed a way as possible. The level of detail is unmatchable.” Mr. Curtis, born in 1868, undertook a massive project after J.P. Morgan paid him $75,000 to take 1,500 images of Native Americans. The project, which ended up taking well over two decades, resulted in about 40,000 images of 80 tribes west of the Mississippi River. The images were collected in the 20-volume work “The North American Indian,” for which Theodore Roosevelt wrote an introduction. The time-consuming project left Mr. Curtis financially unstable and led to a divorce from his wife. In recent years, the images have faced critique for being staged or altered, such as through the editing out a clock from one photo. But Mr. Curtis believed the effort was critical for documenting native culture. “The passing of every old man or woman means the passing of some tradition, some knowledge of sacred rites possessed by no other; consequently the information that is to be gathered, for the benefit of future generations, respecting the mode of life of one of the great races of mankind, must be collected at once or the opportunity will be lost for all time,” he wrote in his introduction. The Stinson Beach Library is open from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Mondays and Fridays, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturdays and from 1 to 9 p.m. on Tuesdays.