BOOKSHELF

BOOKSHELF DWELLERS AT THE SOURCE: SOUTHWESTERN INDIAN PHOTOGRAPHS OF A. C. VROMAN, 1895-1904, by William Webb and Robert A. Weinstein. University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, NM 87131. 1987. 213 pages. $41.45, hardcover; $26.45, softcover; postpaid.

This magnificent collection of Adam Clark Vroman's Southwestern Indian photographs was first released by Grossman Publishers, New York, in 1973. The quality, beauty, and ethnological value of the collection more than justify the decision of the University of New Mexico Press to offer the publication again.

Three turn-of-the-century photographers documented the lives of the Hopi Indians extensively. Adam Vroman first came to the Hopi villages in 1895, and the work he did there and with other Indians of the Southwest-over the next 14 years ranks among the best. Jo Mora visited the Hopi mesas in 1903 and often thereafter for a decade. Kate Cory lived among the Hopis in 1905 and photographed the cycle of their ceremonial year. Today, most critics consider her work better than Mora's, but a bit below the level of contrast, insight, and artistry achieved by Vroman. If any photographer worked extensively among the Hopis in northern Arizona before Vroman, neither the person nor the photographs have come to the attention of a critic.

Vroman was born in LaSalle, Illinois, in 1856. When he was 18 years old, he went to work for the railroad. In 1892 Vroman married a young woman suffering with tuberculosis. In an effort to regain her health, the couple moved to Pasadena, California. Two years later, Esther Vroman died at her birthplace, Flora Dale, Pennsylvania, with her husband by her side.

Vroman returned to Pasadena and with a partner, J. D. Glasscock, opened a book, stationery, and photo supply shop-an event which proved a turning point in Vroman's life.

Although he had only a bare bones education, he must have had an insatiable intellectual curiosity. As a bookman, he was both seller and collector. He developed a near-reverential attitude toward the arts and artifacts of distant and diverse cultures. He traveled and read and gained ever-broadening understanding and appreciation.

In 1895 Adam Clark Vroman took his first photographic field trip to the Indian country of Arizona and New Mexico. Seven other photo expeditions to this same high desert land were to follow, the final one in 1904. Vroman also made many other trips to national parks, California missions, Canada, France, Germany, and Japan, everywhere capturing beauty with his lens.

But the text and 180 duotone plates of Dwellers at the Source are devoted to the nine-year period that Vroman traveled among the Southwestern Indians. Here are the Hopi, Zuni, Navajo, and the Rio Grande Pueblo Indians of nearly a century ago. Vroman pictured them as they were, young, old, sick, beautiful-no posing or props to enhance the final product, just the natural dignity of these Native Americans. Vroman saw them not as animated artifacts but as human beings.

The authors, whose words introduce and augment the photographs, are not reluctant to note the failures of AngloIndian relationships. William Webb, a writer and photographer, and Robert A. Weinstein, a maritime and photographic historian, rightfully place some portion of those failures on insensitive anthropologists, bumbling bureaucrats, and "try it-you'll like it" missionaries.

Dwellers at the Source is one among a great many books on Indians published in the last 50 years. It would be difficult to find a finer one.

TOO FUNNY TO BE PRESIDENT, by Morris K. Udall. Henry Holt and Company, Inc. 115 W. 18th St., New York, NY 10011. 1988. 249 pages. $17.95, hardcover; postpaid.

Anyone who gets Erma Bombeck to write the foreword for his book of humor must be very selfconfident. Erma is a tough act to follow, but Mo does it without even needing a second wind.

In his 28 years in Congress, Udall has used humor as a political tool. It is never bitter or venomous, but it is effective. It has advanced his politi-cal goals and thwarted programs he had no faith in.

Too Funny to be President is pure

delight from page one to the back

cover. Among the gems is the men Election of an incumbent congressman who decides to run for another term.

While campaigning at home, he tells one of the locals that he is running for Congress and asks him to vote for him.

"Sure," says the man. "Anything's better than what we got there."