Curanderos

1934 · ref. 10265 — Los Angeles 1934. 24 film negatives 4 1/8 x 3 1/8" all in fine condition. Also includes 10 positive photos on proof sheets digitally converted from the negatives. John Cudney 1847-1934 better known as Brother Isaiah or the "Miracle Man" was a Canadian-born faith healer evangelist and eventual leader of a strange religious community in Los Angeles. He first achieved notoriety in New Orleans around 1920 where reports of miraculous cures drew enormous crowds to his houseboat on the Mississippi. Thousands reportedly waited to see him extra streetcars were put into service concession stands appeared along the levee and charitable organizations provided food and blankets for the sick who had traveled to seek his touch. Cudney carried his ministry to California establishing "Miracle Hill" in Los Angeles near Lincoln Park where crowds again gathered to watch the long-haired white-robed prophet lay hands upon the sick. His activities attracted controversy as well as followers and in 1921 he was tried for manslaughter following the death of a seriously ill woman who had received his treatment; he was acquitted. Cudney ultimately proclaimed himself the 88th and final incarnation of the prophet Isaiah and established the Colony of the Saints near Oroville California where his followers became known as the "Immortals." He preached his own immortality and promised his disciples that they too would never die if obedient to his teachings. His own death in 1934 put that promise to the test with Time reporting the scene: "On his Oroville hillside last fortnight Death came as it must to all men to Brother Isaiah 90. Authorities did not discover it until last week. Squatted around his corpse praying without cease his 40 "Immortals" waited his resurrection. Authorities looked at the body decided it had better be buried while there was something still left to bury. Next day in overalls and gingham the "Immortals" who support themselves by farming chanted a requiem as Brother Isaiah was lowered into the earth. He lay in a plain pine box his head pointed toward the north his long white whiskers flowing over his long white robe. His followers plowed and harrowed the earth above him went away to await his second coming." The present photographs appear to date principally from Cudney's later California years. Several show Brother Isaiah in his more familiar guise posed in a garden and inside a home in a floor-length white garment with Bible in hand. A particularly interesting group documents his fascination with aviation: Cudney appears transformed into a rather dapper figure in a dark three-piece suit beside a Maddux Air Lines plane and a Ford Trimotor while another shows him in a tan suit beside a likely Continental Airlanes commercial aircraft. Most striking are photographs apparently associated with the Graf Zeppelin's 1929 world tour and its stop at Mines Field in Los Angeles including Cudney among German aviators and wearing a large Graf Zeppelin service badge over his white suit and ten-gallon hat. The aeronautical imagery is oddly appropriate; Cudney had decades earlier prophesied that "Man will find himself wings." An unusual surviving photographic record of one of the stranger figures in early twentieth-century American faith healing. . unknown