Background
Laura Gilpin was born in Austin Bluffs, Colorado, on April 22, 1891.
(Beautiful black and white photos; ink illustrations; ppho...)
Beautiful black and white photos; ink illustrations; pphotos are of the ruins as they stood in 1948, a part of history that cannot be recaptured.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0007DZFXM/?tag=2022091-20
(Illustrated throughout from photographs taken by Laura Gi...)
Illustrated throughout from photographs taken by Laura Gilpin; map endpapers. Pictorial study of The Rio Grande River, which runs mostly along the Texas-Mexican border, and lives and lands it touches.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000OMJS2K/?tag=2022091-20
(Laura Gilpin, 1950-2007 was a gifted poet and a caring nu...)
Laura Gilpin, 1950-2007 was a gifted poet and a caring nurse. n 1976 she won the Walt Whitman award for her book, The Hocus Pocus of the Universe, published by Doubleday. After an early arts career as a poet and writing teacher, she shifted gears and became a registered nurse. Her second book of poetry, The Weight of a Soul, remains a shimmering reflection of the values she embraced.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0982132808/?tag=2022091-20
(A contemporary of Mary Austin, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Wil...)
A contemporary of Mary Austin, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Willa Cather, Laura Gilpin was unique among women chroniclers of the Southwest because she worked in photography. She perceived the region as an environment for human activity rather than a place for untouched beauty, and her empathy for her subjects is evident in her work. Even in her eighties--ignoring the physical infirmities of age--she would camp overnight to be near a place she wanted to photograph at the break of day. The vast empty stretches of the Southwestern desert did not deter her. She thought nothing of driving several hundred miles to make one image of a Navajo ceremony or making a long flight in a small plane to see a particular mountain peak. Gilpin's sixty-year career established her as one of the outstanding photographers of the twentieth century. Here are her pictures of the Navajo people and the stories of their lives in the 1950s and 1960s.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000Q9MCMO/?tag=2022091-20
Laura Gilpin was born in Austin Bluffs, Colorado, on April 22, 1891.
Although she briefly attended eastern boarding schools, she grew up in Colorado Springs and always thought of herself as a westerner.
Gilpin studied with White for two years, then returned home to Colorado to set up a commercial photography studio.
Even as a child she enjoyed exploring the mountains around her home. In 1903 Gilpin got a Brownie camera, which she used the following year to photograph the St. Louis World's Fair, and about 1909 she began experimenting with autochromes, a new color photographic process developed in France. Living on her family's ranch on the western slope of the Rockies from 1911 to 1915, Gilpin raised poultry and continued making pictures. By the time she went to New York in 1916 to study at the Clarence H. White School of Photography (with money saved from her poultry business) she was an accomplished amateur photographer. While earning her living doing portraits and advertising work, she began exploring the Southwest and making pictures of the Pueblo Indians and the ruins of their Anasazi ancestors. These early, atmospheric pictures showed the influence of her training with White, a leading pictorial photographer who emphasized mood rather than detail in his photographs. Gilpin later moved away from this soft-focus approach and adopted a more straightforward, hard-edged style for photographing the Southwest. Gilpin's long-term involvement with the Navajo began in 1930 when she ran out of gas on their reservation while on a camping trip with her companion Elizabeth Forster. Deeply impressed by the Navajo people who came to their aid, Forster became a field nurse on the reservation. She lived in Red Rock, Arizona, for two years. Gilpin later became a frequent visitor to the reservation and, through the contacts made by her friend, began to photograph the Navajo people. Her pictures of families, trading posts, hogans, and ceremonies form a compassionate record of traditional Navajo life. After Forster lost her job in 1933 financial difficulties and a number of photographic projects kept Gilpin away from the reservation for 16 years. In 1941 she published her first major book, The Pueblos: A Camera Chronicle, based on a series of lantern slides she had made of archaeological sites. During World War II (1942 - 1944) she worked as a public relations photographer for the Boeing Company in Wichita, Kansas, and then moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she resumed making photographic books. Temples in Yucatan: A Camera Chronicle of Chichen Itza appeared in 1948 and The Rio Grande: River of Destiny, her monumental study of the Rio Grande and the people along its banks, came out the following year. In 1950 Gilpin returned to the Navajo reservation to gather more pictures for a book. Although she initially thought it would be a quick and easy job, her work on the project took 18 years. She travelled all over the reservation, as she could spare time away from her commercial business, gathering information and pictures that would help her tell the story of the Navajo peoples' adaptation to modern American life. Eventually, she came to realize the great importance of traditional beliefs to the Navajo people, and her project began to focus on how traditions could be maintained in a rapidly changing world. The Enduring Navaho, which finally appeared in 1968, was widely hailed by anthropologists and by the Navajo people themselves as a truthful and compassionate record of Navajo life. During the 19706, Gilpin regained much of the recognition in national photographic circles that she had enjoyed in the 19206. She was at work on a photographic book about the Canyon de Chelly and its Navajo inhabitants when she died in Santa Fe on November 30, 1979.
(A contemporary of Mary Austin, Mabel Dodge Luhan, and Wil...)
(Beautiful black and white photos; ink illustrations; ppho...)
(Illustrated throughout from photographs taken by Laura Gi...)
(Laura Gilpin, 1950-2007 was a gifted poet and a caring nu...)