Maya's video: Laura Gilpin

Laura Gilpin (April 22, 1891 -- November 30, 1979) was an American photographer known for her photographs of Native Americans, particularly the Navajo and Pueblo, and her Southwestern landscapes. "What I consider really fine landscapes are very few and far between," Laura Gilpin wrote to a friend in 1956. "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." Gilpin spoke with authority about the challenge of landscape photography. Her first published picture, a view of the Grand Canyon, appeared in a photography magazine in 1916, and since then she had hiked, driven, and flown tens of thousands of miles across the Southwest. Just weeks before her death in 1979 at the age of 88, she leaned out the window of a small plane flying low over the Rio Grande valley to make her last photographs. No other woman in the history of American photography so devoted herself to chronicling the landscape. Others photographed the land, but none can be regarded as a landscape photographer with a sustained body of work documenting the physical terrain. Anne Brigman (1869-1950) often photographed in the woodlands and along the coast near her California home, but the land was generally a setting for her artfully placed nudes, and her pictures were less landscapes than elaborately staged allegories. Dorothea Lange (1895-1965), along with Gilpin the only woman included in a recent Museum of Modern Art survey of American landscape photography, photographed west Texas and California for her project "Dorothea Lange Looks at the American Country Woman" (1967). But her landscapes were always conceived of as counterparts to her portraits of rural women. Other women in the West and Southwest photographed landscapes even more incidentally. When the eastern pictorial photographers Louise Deshong Woodbridge (1848-1925) and Clara Sipprell (1880-1975) passed through the Southwest on vacation trips early in this century, they made skillful views. But these pictures were not part of a sustained commitment to landscape work. Barbara Morgan (b. 1900) began to photograph the southwestern landscape on a trip through Arizona and New Mexico around 1930, but shortly thereafter her sons were born and she abandoned landscape photography for work that would allow her to stay closer to home. Only in the last decade or two have younger women in the region begun to pursue landscape photography seriously. Gilpin thus claims her own niche in the photographic world. For even as her interest in landscape work distinguishes her from other women photographers, her approach to landscape photography sets her apart from the men who documented the same subject. Gilpin was interested in the land as an environment that shaped human activity, an approach that distinguished her from such nineteenth-century photographer-explorers as William Henry Jackson or Timothy O'Sullivan, and from her contemporary, Ansel Adams, who photographed the West as a place of inviolate, pristine beauty. For Gilpin the southwestern landscape was neither an empty vista awaiting human settlement nor a jewel-like scene resisting human intrusion. It was a peopled landscape with a rich history and tradition of its own, an environment that shaped and molded the lives of its inhabitants. Gilpin developed her point of view on her own. As Ansel Adams said after her death, she had "a highly individualistic eye. I don't have the sense that she was influenced except by the land itself." http://www.cla.purdue.edu/WAAW/Sandweiss/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laura_Gilpin Music: Robert Tree Cody - In Camps of Times Past