Photography & the Southwest Vision: Eric Shaw

PHOTOGRAPHY AND THE SOUTHWEST VISION

By Eric Shaw

Gallup is the center of its own art world, and New Mexico’s sense of enchantment inspires people to recognize beauty everywhere in the state. New Mexico helps artists make art—as the local production of jewelry, blankets, and figurines testifies to.

The Southwest has influenced art worldwide, as well as locally. Famous painters like Georgia O’Keefe and great writers like D.H. Lawrence engaged the land. It’s captivated great photographers, too.

I want to take you on a tiny tour of Southwest photographers—looking at three artists from past and present—one’s famous, one’s obscure, and one lives right in Gallup’s downtown.

The philosophies and subject matter of these three will train us to see New Mexico in ways outside the norm.

Dorothea Lange, Raildroad Tracks, Southwestern New Mexico, 1933 Dorothea Lange, White Angel

The first is Dorothea Lange (1895 – 1965).

As a renowned Depression-era photographer, she isn’t known for pictures of the Southwest, but she worked here when depicting the refugees of the 30s Dustbowl and the 40s internment camps.

She took some landscape pictures, besides. She was spirited when young, attending Columbia University and breaking out to travel the world at age 23. However, she was robbed when she hit San Francisco and ended up settling down across the bay in Berkeley— for the rest of her life! There, she married one of the Southwest’s famous painters, Maynard Dixon, whose way of depicting landscapes, in simplified geometries of gorgeous hues, call to mind the work of O’Keefe—though he lacked O’Keefe’s lyrical sense of abstraction and great adventurousness in color.

Fifteen years in, she left Dixon and wed the UC Berkeley professor, Paul Schuster Taylor. Together, they toured New Mexico and other areas where Dust Bowl refugees settled.

The Farm Security Administration paid for this work. Later the War Relocation Authority employed her to photograph the forced displacement of Japanese Americans—whose internment camps were often located in Southwest deserts.

Her pictures powerfully influenced national policy toward dislocated farmers, and when she got back to Berkeley, her influential work continued through the founding of Aperture Magazine with Southwest photographer, Ansel Adams.

There was no magazine like it. It supplied a rare platform for serious examples of photographic craft and was the first magazine of its sort since O’Keefe’s husband, Alfred Steiglitz, published Camera Work from 1903 to 1917.

Of her work in this area, one writer said, “Her images of the Southwest are unconcerned with its beauty, depicting it as less of a place and more of a blank space between places.”

Lange herself was critical of photographers who took advantage of the “obviously picturesque” Southwest — suggesting that it was too easy to take pictures here. Dorothea Lange, untitled internment camp

Her picture, Railroad photograph, c. 1942 Tracks Southwestern New Mexico, ignores the commonplace bravura vision inspired by the dramatic scale of the state’s flatlands, rocks, and sky. Plain, but geometrically interesting, her photo successfully shows a “place between places.”

She fought polio her whole life and said of it, “It formed me, guided me, instructed me, [and] helped me.” Eventually, esophageal cancer killed her. She died in San Francisco in 1965—the city that first restrained her wandering ways. She was 70.

Unlike Lange, Berlyn Brixner (1911 – 2009) isn’t known for his artistic or social vision.

But the wartime government paid his bills, just as it did Lange’s.

His fame came from making a visual record of the Manhattan Trinity Test in Alamogordo, New Mexico—the first detonation of an A-Bomb.

Seventy-three years ago, Bixner’s southwest vision rocked the world. His contribution is historical in terms of technique, as well as subject matter.

When called to his role, he had to invent photo methods to reveal something brighter than the sun that existed for scant seconds. He came up with rotating mirror cameras (which could take pictures at hundreds of thousands of frames per second), and on July 16, 1945, he created some of the most famous Southwest images known.

Berlyn Bixner, Trinity Test photos, 1945

Though artifacts for history, these pictures also helped scientists resolve mathematical problems that required measurement of the fireball’s flicker-quick growth. The math guys got what they needed; he then found his niche with them. He stayed in the state, where he was born, working at Los Alamos the remainder of his vocational days.

Before dying at 98, he nailed down meaningful patents and published more than 45 papers on technical aspects of photography. His lens innovations were employed on some of the farthest-traveling cameras ever. They were mounted on two Mariner missions to Mars.

Milan Sklenar, Landscape

Like Lange, local artist, Milan Skelnar (b. 1941) is known for helping other artists.

He owns and directs Crashing Thunder Gallery on Coal Ave. His cameras have traveled pretty far, too.

When he arrived in New York City from Czechoslovakia in 1984, he was interested in street photography. The Hungarian master of the camera, Andre Kertez, helped him see.

When UNM gave him a professorship, he found himself traveling farther west than planned—and he landed where scant street material existed to catch his eye. Like Lange, he didn’t want to turn to the desert’s charms. “Because it is so beautiful, it is hard to photograph,” he said. But the local landscape had its way. He found a street photographer’s approach to it—one that played with horizon lines and the arrangement of discrete elements in the frame—a little like the famous modernist, Jim Dine; a little like the way things jumble in a street.

Sklenar’s photography tells stories of the landscape’s sparseness, even as it offers reverence to scattered desert elements, similar to how street photographers show us fleeting dramas on open sidewalks or how gallery curators put pictures on walls.

Sklenar steered Czechoslovakian city vision toward Southwest sandscape.

In the many roles he has played for Gallup—professor, photographer, and gallery director, Sklenar, like Bixner and Lange, has shown us Southwest visions unlike ones seen before.