PEOPLE

PEOPLE PHOTOGRAPHS BY LAURA GILPIN

Laura Gilpin's contemporaries Paul Strand, Leonard McCombe, Clara Sipprell and Barbara Morgan, among others were drawn to people and places. But when Gilpin looked at a scene, she saw only one thing: emotion.

That's what attracted her to the Navajos and the Zunis, to the earthy, sandstone spires of Monument Valley, to the shadows of Canyon de Chelly, and into pueblos and onto reservations across the Southwest.

"Many enter the field of photography with the impulse to record a scene," she wrote in the book The Complete Photographer in 1942. "They often fail to realize that what they wish to do is to record the emotion felt upon viewing that scene.... A mere record photograph in no way reflects that emotion."

Born in Austin Bluffs, Colorado, in 1891, Gilpin was inspired by photography from an early age. Her father gifted her a Brownie camera for her 12th birthday, and by the time she was 17, she had made her first Autochrome print and had moved to New York to study the art. When she was stricken with influenza in 1918, she returned to Colorado and into the care of a nurse, Betsy Forster.

The two became companions, and when Forster received a post with the New Mexico Bureau of Indian Affairs, Gilpin began her love affair with the desert Southwest, making several significant trips to record the lives of the native people who inhabit it.

"By the early 1950s, Gilpin had done a few projects in New Mexico and Colorado, and really wanted to return to the subject of Navajo life, so she began work on a book," says Jessica May, associate curator of photographs at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, which holds Gilpin's extensive collection. "The result, The Enduring Navaho, was arguably the most important project of her life."

The book, which was published by University of Texas Press in 1968, features hundreds of black-and-white images of Navajos, from sheepherders and silversmiths to medicine men and mothers with their babies. In it, Gilpin wrote, "It is my hope that these pages will stir an understanding of this energetic tribe, and awaken an interest in its imaginative and poetic background."

Emotion.

Indeed, Gilpin was invested in the desert.

"She was particularly sensitive," May says. "Historically, She didn't just visit as a cultural tourist. She considered it her home in a fundamental way. She was sensitive to the people. Her photographs have an almost anthropological bent she sought out the same families. Her photography really cuts between the landscape tradition and documentary traditions."

Although her health was failing, Gilpin made one final trip to the Navajo Indian Reservation in the late 1970s. She wanted, May says, to create a book of images from Canyon de Chelly. The project was never realized she died in 1979 but it speaks to Gilpin's deep relationship with the landscape and its people.

"She knew she could make a living hocking her photographs to tourists in New York City," May says. "But she was deeply rooted in the canyon lands. She wasn't interested in the mythical or abstract idea of the people. She was interested and invested in their daily lives."

- Kelly Kramer