life’s work

How two eminent, long-married photographers, archivists, and gallerists changed the artistic landscape of Santa Fe by putting photography at its heart

BY STUART A. ASHMAN PHOTOGRAPHY BY JANET RUSSEK AND DAVID SCHEINBAUM

Perhaps it is the quality of light and the monumental landscapes. Or the diversity of ancient cultures and traditions. Whatever the lure, New Mexico, particularly Santa Fe and Taos, has attracted artists and photographers for millennia.

Native Americans had been making art here for centuries before Europeans arrived. But it was more recently that New Mexico earned its estimable reputation in the art world. In the late 1920s, a group of painters known as “Los Cinco Pintores” made Santa Fe their headquarters, building studios and houses on Camino del Monte Sol. A broken wagon wheel led Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips to remain in Taos to paint and found the Taos Society of Artists. Mabel Dodge Luhan, after settling in Taos, invited writers and artists, including the iconic Georgia O’Keeffe.

Photographers were not far behind. New Mexico attracted Ansel Adams, Paul Strand, Minor White, Willard Van Dyke, Laura Gilpin, Paul Caponigro, Walter Chappell, and William Clift among others. Some visited regularly; others settled permanently.

Janet Russek and David Scheinbaum are two photographers who came from New York City in the late 1970s and, like many artists before them, made New Mexico their home. The dynamic husband-and-wife duo are among the art world’s most important photographers. Though the subjects of their images are sometimes widely different—from pregnancy to Hip Hop—they share parallel masteries of photographic techniques, infinitely careful skills of observation, and intellectual curiosity that make their images beautiful and fascinating.

Parallel, too, are their deep reverence for the great photography of the past and a sense of responsibility about keeping it in front of the public. The impact that they have made as educators and coaches has impacted countless nascent photographers in New Mexico and together they have made an important place for photography in Santa Fe.

Brooklyn born and bred, the couple has shared roots in Jewish families and neighborhoods. “Our families focused on the arts and education,” Russek says, whose family history includes artists and an appreciation for art. “The Brooklyn Museum was a part of our lives from childhood on.”

Both were educated in New York public schools and graduated from the City University of New York colleges. Russek trained as an archivist and conservator at the Brooklyn Museum. Scheinbaum studied and practiced his photography and, at a very young age, taught photography at Pace University and LaGuardia Community College in New York. They met through mutual friends in Brooklyn in 1978 and married in 1982.

Scheinbaum’s interest in photography led him to New Mexico in the late 1970s. While studying the history of photography, he learned that one of his heroes, Beaumont Newhall, lived in Santa Fe. Widely recognized as “The Father of the History of Photography,” Newhall served as the first curator of photography at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and was a persuasive advocate for the recognition of photography as a legitimate art form.

Scheinbaum’s dream was to work with Newhall, so he made a cold-call. Much to his surprise, Beaumont agreed, and there began a relationship that lasted more than 15 years and changed Scheinbaum’s and Russek’s careers and lives.

“I had visited Santa Fe during a cross-country trip in the early 70s and was quite enchanted with it,” Russek says. “When David decided to move, I was the only friend who supported the plan and even helped him pack.”

Scheinbaum’s first project for Beaumont: Organize his mentor’s library. Drawing on his knowledge and family history in the book business, Scheinbaum successfully devised a system of cataloging and reorganizing Newhall’s collection of precious books. Next, Scheinbaum became the exclusive printer for Newhall’s images, moving the process away from a New York laboratory to Santa Fe. Scheinbaum now serves as the executor of the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall Estate.

Russek joined Scheinbaum in Santa Fe in 1980. “We both were ready for new adventures and Santa Fe was—and still is—a place where you are accepted as artists and you can have dreams that come through with hard work,” she says.

Through the artists’ network in town, Russek was recruited to serve as an assistant to the eminent photographer Eliot Porter. She became his archivist, assistant, collaborator, and good friend. She began by helping Porter mount his color photographs for a 1979 Intimate Landscapes solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. She spent the next three years cataloging some 7,000 of Porter’s photographs, becoming so familiar with the scope of his oeuvre that she inspired several new publications of his work.

Porter’s photographic archive was committed to the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas. In order to continue his legacy in his hometown, Russek suggested to Porter that he also leave a representative body of his life’s work to the permanent collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe. It represented a significant gift to the State of New Mexico, and Russek now serves as the representative of the Eliot Porter Estate.

The seemingly tireless couple turned to another project intended to feature the photographers they most admired. In 1980 they created Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd., a gallery in a modest adobe house in what was then the Westside barrio. The inaugural show featured the work of Willard Van Dyke. Subsequent exhibitions focused on Edward Weston, Diane Arbus, Manuel Carrillo, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, Henri Cartier Bresson, Robert Frank, Gustave Baumann, and many others.

After that success, they moved in 1987 to Guadalupe Street in the area now known as the Railyard and remained there until 1994, after showcasing more than 300 photographers. Then they built a gallery, archive, and library next to their home and continue to represent the highest level of photography internationally.

Scheinbaum also served as a professor of photography at the College of Santa Fe for 33 years, and was awarded the honorific of professor emeritus. Later at the Marion Center for Photographic Arts, he served as director and subsequently distinguished himself as director and chair of Photographic Studies at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design.

Meanwhile, Scheinbaum and Russek continued to develop significant bodies of their own photographic works and collaborated on several projects and books. Among their collaborations is Images in the Heavens, Patterns on the Earth: The I Ching, Museum of New Mexico Press (2004), a handsome volume of their photographs that enhances the written words in this ancient Chinese classic. “The I Ching is one of our most important projects together as we use the I Ching and its counseling in our lives,” says Russek. “In many ways it is autobiographical.”

Another joint work is Ghost Ranch: Land of Light, Balcony Press (1997), which required the couple to hike for years through hundreds of acres to photograph the landscape and environment that so deeply inspired Georgia O’Keeffe. Later they spent a decade making photographs in New York’s Lower East Side, culminating in the 2017 Radius Books publication Remnants: Photographs of the Lower East Side

“Remnants brought us back to our roots in New York and the history of immigration and Jewish culture in both our families,” Russek says.

Radius Books also published a monograph of Russek‘s long-term project, The Tenuous Stem, focusing on new life emanating from a seed, bud, or a woman’s pregnant belly.

Hip Hop: Portraits of an Urban Hymn, Damiani (2013), is Scheinbaum’s exploration of the beauty and dynamism of the Hip Hop world. It includes photos that were in the first exhibition of Hip Hop imagery at National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC, in 2008. His most recent effort, Varanasi: City Immersed in Prayer, George F. Thompson Publishing (2022), beautifully documents the people and ceremonies in this holy city in India.

Having found a vibrant arts culture in Santa Fe when they arrived from the East, Scheinbaum and Russek helped put photography at its heart. They participated in the Santa Fe Center of Photography, a gathering place and modest exhibition space for New Mexico’s photographers, beginning in the late 1970s. They are also founding members of the New Mexico Council of Photography and Russek is one of the founders of the Santa Fe Children’s Museum.

Russek and Scheinbaum credit their mentors, Eliot Porter and Beaumont Newhall, with teaching them the importance of passing on one’s knowledge to future generations of young photographers, because they were fortunate enough to work with these two giants of photography. Both Russek and Scheinbaum take this responsibility seriously and it serves as the guiding light of their work. Their gallery and personal library of photographic books are testimony to their commitment to this medium and to the artists who work in it. R

ON AUDACITY (What I Want to Say to Santa Fe)

The celebrated mixed-media artist Rose B. Simpson in words and images

BY ROSE B. SIMPSON

PHOTOGRAPHY BY KATE RUSSELL

It’s a Thursday late afternoon and I’m in a hotel room on 10th Avenue in Manhattan’s Chelsea neighborhood. My black linen shirt is still nicely flattened on the ironing board, a few pieces of jewelry next to it. I’m curled up in the pink chair by the window to gather my thoughts, tracing the leafless branches of the one tree outside with my eyes. Amidst the smattering of New York City street sounds, my phone buzzes. I don’t dare look at it.

I’m missing home. I miss my mama—the sun across her living room floor, the crackle in her wood stove, the smell of bean stew. I miss the silent nights broken only by dog barks and coyote calls. I think of my converse tracks all around the sandy driveway. Proof of life. I close my eyes and I’m suddenly walking the hill behind the house. Stiff yellow grasses twitch through long juniper shadows in a raking afternoon breeze.

My phone buzzes again, and I flip it over to see the numbers on the screen. It is time. I pull the shirt over my head, then lower the strands of heishi beads to my shoulders. I catch my somber reflection in the mirror and take a deep breath. It’s time for this ceremony.

From the street I can see my name in big, vinyl letters through the gallery window. My feet don’t leave tracks on these damp sidewalks, but here, this is one way to make a mark. Before I take the first step into the gallery-opening maw, voices beginning their layering into a monotone chorus, I whisper a small prayer: Guide me, help me to know my way.

I’ve spent my life pondering lots of things; one has been the role of audacity in my becoming.

I was born at the Santa Fe Indian Hospital and spent most of my childhood in my ancestral homelands at Santa Clara Pueblo, with alternating weekend visits to my father’s in Santa Fe. I lived in the very transformer on the utility pole of culture, passing through me back and forth, forever duly noted. My bicultural vantage point, a misfortune/privilege.

My families: psychologically complex, academically sutured, glistening sharp, blissfully haphazard, tortured and innovative, rapturous, headstrong, and notoriously misfitted.… This was what grew me.

For these foundational neural pathways, I give thanks. For the (many) moments of self-righteous justification, I give a chuckle and a thanks. For the stomach drop when the chair collapses under me and I ended back at the bottom of my self-loathing, I give thanks. Who, yes, who do you think you are?! What a ride.

Audacity has taught me to believe my thoughts, deeply. I’ve marched them straight to handcuffs in the backseats of police cars, lengthy art school critiques, drudges, slogs, and eruptions through a plethora of relationship dynamics. These audacious thoughts were my fuel, my ID, my ticket to ride, with a can of Red Bull in hand. My self-righteous victimhood paraded me through the times when the sucking hole in my center might have imploded, but didn’t, and I give thanks. My audacity got me here. My irreverence and my daring, toxic natures made changes happen. My disdain for beliefs that differed from mine pulled, prodded, and whined. I stomped until I got what I thought I wanted. But there was always more. I preyed on audacious discomfort.

My art practice is not a perfect one. I have dared myself to threaten what I was taught was acceptable, to delve into distorted figure, or reality, or imperfection. I have journeyed to find love in the roughage of self. I’ve scratched and clawed at truth. I’ve spat and screamed and sobbed, and turned the volume all the way up—which might be why my ears ring and my eyes feel so heavy. There are stories in there.

All this digging, chewing and spitting, ripping at myself and everyone around me, and there I was: tired. Breathing hard. Sitting at the head of a massive trail of destruction. Accomplished. Deconstructed.

There I was, so tired I didn’t have the energy to believe myself anymore.

And for once, there was silence. It felt good. Like shadows do.

The justifications dissolved, the bones from my jaw to what was once the soft place in my infant skull unclenched.

Is it still audacity if it is not inherently in a state of opposition? Even the turmoil found a neutral witness. For what, what could I possibly know?

I still might ask, I still might listen, I might just wonder. I might, at times, find solace in an old pattern and get back to my entitled beating. And this, too, makes some endearing sense.

In all the breaking down, there is rhythm and process. In all the smashing is faith. I might laugh when something breaks, feel the smallness in an exhale and the strata move on an inhale. I might remember that the witnessing goes both ways. I might notice that vulnerability might just be an audacious act in a world reeking of entitlement. Hey, we are not alone. Hey, water flows with the grace of a guest.

My audacity is the squeeze of my lungs to push my breath in prayer as it curls down around my chin and up over my nose, wrapping itself between my eyes and trickling through the strands of my hair. It plops itself to the earth and sieves through the crust. It flaps and lifts higher and higher, and upon hitting sunlight, scatters into thousands of miniature spheres, each popping like soap bubble explosions, turning into the wild.

It is an audacious one, intention in the third dimension. R