• About the Work of Art

• Activities for Storm from La Bajada Hill, New Mexico, 1946
   

As a child growing up in Colorado, Laura Gilpin hiked and camped, rode horses, and ranched. Gilpin and her close friend Anne Parrish frequently visited General William Jackson Palmer, founder of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad and the town of Colorado Springs. They would all go on long walks and horseback rides together. Gilpin later recalled,

I was less than ten . . . and as we rode, [General Palmer] would point to plants, trees and wild life, citing their names. He taught me to know the outdoors, and especially to love it. At Christmas he always gave me a nice book. In fact, an influential one and the one I loved the best was Hunting Wild Animals with a Camera.

For her twelfth birthday, Gilpin received a Brownie camera. The next year, Gilpin and her camera accompanied her mother’s best friend, Laura Perry, to the St. Louis World’s Fair, a celebration of the 1803 Louisiana Purchase. Perry was blind, so Gilpin verbally described everything at the fair to her. She later credited this experience for kindling her interest in photography.

After studying at the Clarence White School of Photography in New York City in 1916–17, Gilpin returned to her native Colorado Springs to begin her professional photographic career. Although she supported herself through portrait and architectural photography, her real love was for the outdoors. She began exploring Colorado and New Mexico on camping trips in the early 1920s and continued this practice into her eighties. She would camp overnight to be near a place that she wanted to photograph. Gilpin thought nothing of driving several hundred miles to make one image of a Navajo ceremony or taking a long flight in a small plane to see a particular mountain peak.

Through four major books, The Pueblos: A Camera Chronicle (1941), Temples in Yucatan: A Camera Chronicle of Chichén Itzá (1948), The Rio Grande, River of Destiny (1949), and The Enduring Navaho (1968), Laura Gilpin established herself as an important commentator on the cultural geography of the Southwest and the culture of two of its native peoples. In 1946 she moved from Colorado to New Mexico, a place she had photographed for twenty-five years.

Gilpin created her own niche in the literary and photographic worlds. A contemporary of writers Mary Austin and Willa Cather and arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, she was unique among women chronicling the Southwest because she found her voice making photographic books. Gilpin’s record of southwestern life was compiled over sixty years. Her photographs are about the timeless and enduring qualities of the land and its people.

Among the women who were her photographic colleagues, she was unique because she pursued landscape photography. Historically, women’s photographs were oriented more toward people and social interaction than toward the open landscape. Landscape photography was considered the purview of men who had the physical stamina and financial means to travel unencumbered by the burdens of family or home. Among the men who photographed the southwestern landscape, Gilpin stood out because her primary interest in the land was as an environment that shaped human activity. Her contemporaries Ansel Adams and Eliot Porter, generally photographed it as a place of inviolate, pristine beauty. Also, Gilpin stood apart from many other photographers of Native American life because she had a keen empathy for her subjects, driven not by scientific curiosity but by humane concerns.

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