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PrintLaura Gilpin
Ansel Adams called her "one of the most important photographers of our time"
One of the preeminent 20th Century photographers of the American Southwest, Laura Gilpin was a Westerner by birthright and temperament. Born in Austin Bluffs, Colorado, in 1891, she was raised in Colorado Springs and grew up hiking, camping, riding, and ranching. She was briefly educated at Eastern boarding schools and exposed to refined culture by her mother, but Laura was more her would-be-cowboy father’s daughter. Originally from an established family in Baltimore, Frank Gilpin had moved to Colorado in 1880. Seeking (but not finding) fortune in mining, ranching, and investing, he furnished his family with a rustic lifestyle.
Even as a young girl, Laura shared her father’s penchant for Western adventure. She spent time horseback riding with Gen. William Jackson Palmer, cofounder of the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad, who would point out and name the plants, trees, and wildlife they encountered. “To General Palmer she attributed her lifelong fascination with physical geography,” notes Gilpin scholar Martha A. Sandweiss. It was he, Gilpin said, who taught her to know “and especially to love” the outdoors.
She began photographing in 1903, when her parents gave her a Brownie camera for her 12th birthday. She shot with it constantly, but it was not until a year later that Gilpin really learned to see. Photographing at the 1904 World’s Fair, the 13-year-old was in the company of her mother’s blind best friend, Laura Perry (Gilpin’s namesake). Asked to describe what she saw in great detail, the young girl observed in a way she never had before.
It was a foreshadowing of a career that would ultimately span six decades in an era when photography itself was coming into its own. “As a young woman, she trained as a pictorialist [with Clarence H. White in New York] and initially photographed in a soft-focus, deliberately beautiful fashion,” says Jessica May, associate curator of photographs at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas, where Gilpin’s archives are housed. “Around the beginning of the 1930s, she adopted a harder-focus approach and began documenting the Native people of the Southwest and became part of the mid-20th-century documentary practice.”
Her mentor was fellow Coloradan Gertrude Käsebier, by then a prominent photographer in New York. Known for her portraits of motherhood and Native Americans, Käsebier was also famous for championing photography as a career for women. Gilpin was an especially inspired protégée; in her work, Käsebier saw an intimacy with the landscapes she herself had called home.
In 1931 Gilpin was introduced to the subject that would captivate her for the rest of her life: the Navajo. Visiting her lifelong companion Elizabeth Forster at the Navajo community in Red Rock, Arizona, where Forster was working as a nurse, Gilpin began recording the land and people around her.
Both exactitude and empathy characterized her images, and Gilpin went to great lengths to get the shots she wanted. This was especially true of landscapes. “What I consider really fine landscapes are very few and far between,” she once wrote to a friend. “I consider this field one of the greatest challenges and it is the principal reason I live in the west. I ... am willing to drive many miles, expose a lot of film, wait untold hours, camp out to be somewhere at sunrise, make many return trips to get what I am after.”
Thus determined, she made her living as a photographer and her reputation as an artist. Whether she was chronicling the canyonlands of the American West or the Maya ruins of the Yucatán, she tirelessly pursued both beauty and information.
In her four major books — The Pueblos: A Camera Chronicle (1941); Temples in Yucatán: A Camera Chronicle of Chichén Itzá (1948); The Rio Grande, River of Destiny: An Interpretation of the River, the Land, and the People (1949); and The Enduring Navaho (1968) — Gilpin did more than compile her images. She shared knowledge acquired during a lifetime
of exploring the physical environment and its impact on human culture.
Her most successful and important work remains her studies of the Navajo. In 1956, her Indian images, including pictures of secret tribal ceremonies never before photographed, were mounted in a two-month exhibition called The Enduring Navaho at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. In 1968, her book of the same name was published. American Anthropologist declared that it “deserves a special place among the pictorial records of Navajo country and life.” The Navajo Times was equally complimentary: “Do friends ask you about the Navajos? Send them this book, for it is the heart of the tribe.”
When she died in 1979 at the age of 88 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Gilpin left an important record not just of Native cultures in a time of tremendous transition but of her own restless quest for a fully modern way of seeing. For Sandweiss, that way of seeing was not male or female, feminist or political. “Rather [her images] represent a new humanistic strain in landscape photography that regards people and the physical landscape as an integral whole, an approach offering great possibilities to all artists, men and women alike.”
Two books written or edited by Martha A. Sandweiss offer more images and insights: Laura Gilpin: An Enduring Grace and Denizens of the Desert: A Tale in Word and Picture of Life Among the Navaho Indians, The Letters of Elizabeth W. Forster. For more on the Amon Carter Museum’s collection, visit www.cartermuseum.org.
