Reed was part of an early 20th century school of photographers (along with his better known contemporary Edward Curtis) of Native Americans known as ‘Pictorialists’. Their passion was to show the lives and culture of Native Americans which was ‘gradually vanishing’. Reed lived with and photographed the Ojibwe in Minnesota; the Blackfoot, Piegan, Flathead, Cheyenne, and Blood in northern Montana and southern Canada; and the Navajo and Hopi in Arizona