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Close to 90,000 of his negatives are now part of the University of New Mexico's archives, but Lee Marmon made sure he held on to the one image that launched his career.
Sixty-seven years after his boxy Rolleiflex camera went click, capturing Laguna elder Jeff Sousea sunning himself in a pueblo plaza, photographer Lee Marmon recalls the day in perfect detail. Marmon, then a young partner in his family’s trading post business on the western New Mexico reservation, was rushing through the village on his way to deliver a box of groceries when he came across Sousea, a local character known as Old Man Jeff.
“Can I get a picture?” Marmon asked Old Jeff before being promptly dismissed with a wave of a hand. A self-taught photographer, Marmon often carried a camera with him on his delivery rounds, always hoping he could make a portrait of a willing elder or catch a moment in pueblo life. On his way back through the plaza, Marmon asked again. “This time I offered him a cigar,” Marmon recalls, “and he said, ‘OK.’ ”
The image captured Old Jeff, his face lined and his long hair held back by a headband, dripping in coral and turquoise necklaces, holding that proffered cigar and soaking up the sun like a lizard against a warm, whitewashed adobe wall. But it was his shoes — battered high-top Keds sneakers — that stole the frame and made the picture an icon that would be reproduced in prints, posters, and T-shirts for more than a half-century to come.
Marmon titled the picture White Man’s Moccasins. It would become his signature image, a perfect encapsulation of a turning point in pueblo life. Railroads and paved highways were bringing in tourists and other outsiders, and now-worldly Indian veterans were coming back from their service in World War II, many with non-Indian brides. Marmon’s father, the son of a Laguna mother and an Anglo surveyor, felt change in the air and encouraged Marmon to get the old ways down on film before they were gone.
So Marmon purchased a camera after he returned to the Pueblo from a stint in the Army and taught himself how to use it. “I just read books,” Marmon says. “I never had anybody actually show me.” He liked playing around with his new gadget, and he learned to act fast. Many of his photographs were single frames, partly because of the expense of film and partly because many of the Pueblo elders were uncomfortable sitting for portraits. Marmon learned this lesson early on when he approached an elderly woman at the trading post where he worked.
“I asked about a picture and I got all ready and click,” Marmon recalls. “She heard the click of the camera and she got up and took off. One shot. If you hesitated and made another appointment, a lot of times the old folks would back out. If you got an OK, then you’d better take it.”
Marmon photographed potters, religious dancers, and women plastering their mud walls and hanging out the wash. He never posed people or asked them to dress up, as photographers from outside the Pueblo were known to do. That he was a member of the Pueblo (one-quarter Laguna and known by the nickname “the blue-eyed Indian”) also helped him win the trust of his subjects. “They had to know you,” Marmon says. “I always played it low key. I didn’t use a tripod. I didn’t fuss around. I just took a few snapshots.”
Ninety thousand negatives and six decades later, Marmon found himself boxing up a lifetime’s worth of prints, negatives, and personal papers in 2009, watching as it was all loaded into a van bound for the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. The university, based on the advice and foresight of Michael Kelly, director of the university’s Center for Southwest Research, had paid $300,000 to preserve Marmon’s entire body of work, housing it alongside the entire 20-volume folio set of Edward Curtis’ Indians of North America.
“Lee’s photographic work [not only] spans over 50 years of documentation of both the people and sites around Laguna, but also other events that occurred along old Route 66,” Kelly says. “His collection runs the gamut of activities during the last half
of the 20th century.” Marmon not only documented intertribal celebrations, the uranium mining industry, and his own
family — which has been part of New Mexico history for more than 150 years — but he also took a number of celebrity photographs during the latter half of the 20th century when he worked as a commercial photographer in Palm Springs, California.
Marmon landed in the desert town when his car broke down on his way back from Los Angeles. While waiting for his vehicle to be repaired, he wandered across the street from the repair shop and into the Chamber of Commerce office, where he met his second wife. He stayed, photographing celebrities in town for the Bob Hope Desert Classic, the Palm Desert Tennis Classic, and other charity events from 1967 to 1982. His work from that era includes photos of Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Dinah Shore, Bob Hope, and Ronald Reagan.
Marmon returned to Laguna full time in the early ’80s, and, at 86, he is still shooting and making prints in his studio, a small stucco building that sits behind the home he lives in with his wife, Kathryn. Their house is the old Santa Fe railroad station, and his studio is a former bathhouse from the days when Route 66 travelers stayed the night at a motel the Marmons owned. Marmon’s dark room is in the former women’s shower.
In 2003 he published The Pueblo Imagination: Landscape and Memory in the Photography of Lee Marmon (Beacon Press), and he recently completed a series of black-and-white landscape photographs for Acoma Pueblo’s Sky City Casino, located not far from his home. Marmon still makes prints in his studio for the Photogenesis Gallery in Santa Fe, which represents him.
“I never took it serious when I was doing it,” Marmon says of his start snapping photographs of life in the Pueblo. “I should have done more.” Now, those images serve as some of the last testaments of a bygone era. “Toward the end, I realized I’m documenting the last of the wagons, the last of the old folks.”
The Marmon Collection resides at the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. A detailed guide to the entire collection can be found at rmoa.unm.edu.
