Field Studies

Beyond doubt the Sonoran Desert is my favorite of the four North American deserts.  It's the desert we identify with the towering Saguaro cactus and which also hosts the Cholla, the Prickly Pear and other succulents like agave.  Because it receives twice the rainfall of the Mohave, Chihuahuan and Great Basin Deserts the cacti of the Sonoran Desert come alive with flowers in May and June.  This amazing desert covers much of central and southern Arizona and a thin swath of southern California. It's best accessed from Tucson which is bracketed by Saguaro National Parks on its eastern and western borders.

The Saguaros themselves are immense, they can reach fifty feet, but are also humorous and oddly animate like creatures from a James Cameron movie.  Here I’ve included some portraits of these otherworldly characters.

Head Shots

Two Fridays ago photographer Daryl Black and I scoured Santa Fe for new looks at The City Different.  No mean trick.  On museum hill we played with shadows cast by elaborate portals and arbors.  Daryl said the patterns of light and shadow seemed almost Mayan to her.

After lattes at the Garcia Street Bookstore we crossed town to the railyard for trains, a personal fave, and industrial buildings that have been converted into galleries and studios.  After a fruitless effort with the engines and  carriages, I speak for myself, we wandered down the tracks for some grittier inspiration.  There we found a warehouse with graffiti covered walls and outsized portraits.  Daryl caught me snapping one of the behemoth heads.  

Ranch View Motel and Burger Emporium

Is it just me or is it hungry out?  Giant Burgers you say.  Truth be told, the advertised mongo burger was a run of the mill 1/3 pound number, the one folks get to call big, bigger or gigundo.   But, you ask, “Isn’t this image about an eatery in middle of nowhere New Mexico, a throwback to a kinder, gentler time in rural 1950’s America?”

Ruffles Have Ridges

These are for Thea Swengel who shares my fascination with corrugated buildings.  Both images are from the Chama yard of the Cumbres and Toltec Railroad.  I don’t know where the appeal lies but I’d guess it's the linear repetition and the things that happen when shadows interact with the dead straight verticals.  Or maybe I have no idea whatsoever.

The Same Thing Only Different

Yesterday while hiking and photographing at Georgia O'Keefe's beloved Ghost Ranch I had the realization that each time I visit a familiar site I see it anew.  I see new things and I frame the same subjects in new ways.  That's why a photographer might return to Point Lobos dozens or scores of times and still find it fresh.

So it is with these two images of white windows on a richly textured old adobe.  They were taken several years apart and are very different takes on a tried and true subject. 

Vielle Ferme

The last two years I’ve been awarded First Place for photography at the Museum of the Southwest’s spring juried exhibition.  I’m honored by the recognition and thankful for the Midland Arts Association’s stewardship of the show.  The museum, as I said last year, is a jewel of a place and a must see if you’re in West Texas.  The show runs through April 29. 

Each year I’m surprised by the bounty of wonderful art at the museum.  Showing along with the spring juried show last year was the Plein Air Painters of America’s National Parks exhibition and this year the museum features 100 Years of Photographs of the Grand Canyon.  There’s also a gallery devoted to Taos Masters.  So there’s a lot to see in beautiful downtown Midland.

Vielle Ferme is the winning photograph which comes from our September in Provence.   The meticulously tilled old farm had been in cultivation since middle ages and the rugged stone building for nearly as long.  Only its metal door and cinder block reinforcements betray modernity.  An epic sky completes the ensemble.  Ain’t life grand?

In January the color iteration of Vielle Ferme was on display, and sold most quickly, at the Millicent Rogers Museum’s miniatures show.  This is the rare image that seems to work as well in color as black and white.  As a mostly black and white shooter I lean to monochrome.  Here not so much.  What do you think?

For awhile now I’ve been flirting with the idea of offering specific images at especially attractive prices for that week (the day of the post through the following Sunday).   You receive a signed, editioned 8x12 inch archival pigment print on 13x19 inch Moab Entrada paper for $150.  This is normally $225.  Vielle Ferme is available in color or black and white, a comparitive rarity.

If interested, email me a steve@steveimmelphotography.com.  Thanks all.

The Name of the Rose

A tattooed waif both voluptuous and vulnerable, Rose strode across the courtyard into open shade beneath the portal. Her eyes spoke plaintively and in muted tones.

Fading Roses

Lest I get caught up in an unending flurry of historical vignettes, it’s time for a straight black and white “art” photograph that recalls why I make pictures in the first place.  Just because the subject is worth rendering artfully (hopefully.)

Mission On Two Rivers

Continuing our theme of Spanish colonial missions in New Mexico these are images of the magnificent La Nuestra Senora de Los Angeles de Porciuncula de Los Pecos mission at the Pecos Pueblo just east of Santa Fe. Brevity was not a distinguishing trait of our Spanish brethren.

The Cicuye people arrived in a valley rimmed by snow capped peaks at the confluence of the Pecos and Glorieta Rivers .  There they built two dozen mud and stone villages in the early 1100s.  By 1450 over 2,000 people lived in a five story high complex.  A vibrant economy developed as the Cicuye brokered a robust trade between the Indians of the Rio Grande and those of the buffalo plains to the east.

Pursuing a so-called vision quest in 1540, the conquistador Francisco Vasquez de Coronado discovered the Cicuye Pueblo later named Pecos.  Unlike the Zuni whom he fought and vanquished the Cicuye welcomed the Spanish. Coronado was told of amazing riches to be found farther east in Kansas but found nothing but poor villages.  His Indian guide confessed that he had lured Coronado’s army to the plains to perish and he was strangled for his deceit. 

In 1598 after Don Juan Onate conquered the Pueblo tribes he assigned a friar to Pecos, the most powerful of New Mexico Pueblos.  Episodes of idol smashing and abuse bred understandable animosity until a seasoned missionary, Fray Andres Juarez, arrived from the south.  Juarez directed the construction of a monumental adobe church that was completed between 1621 and 1634.  It was the most imposing of New Mexico’s mission churches and its remains reflect that grandeur.

Still, seething resentments led to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 when the Spanish were driven from northern New Mexico.  But the victory was short lived as Spain’s Diego de Vargas conquered the pueblos again just twelve years later.

By the 1780s disease and inter-tribal warfare had reduced its population to less than 300 and the last survivors had left for the Jemez Pueblo by 1838.

Salt Missions

The Salinas basin covers about 50 miles north to south and within it are the remains of three pueblos and Spanish churches built near them from 1598.  The Spanish conquest and domination was short lived as the entire area had been depopulated by 1670.  While the reasons for this exodus are debated, it was probably due to drought, famine and attacks from the Apaches to the east. The Tehuan people of the Salinas basin spoke the Tiwa language that was also spoken at the abandoned Pecos Pueblo east of Santa Fe and continues to be spoken in the Taos and Jemez Pueblos.  It is believed that the tribes of Pecos and Salinas migrated to Jemez and Taos.

The Salinas Pueblos and Salt Missions are named for the saline lakes in desert-like terrain nearby.  Human habitation here goes back 6,000 years and as many as 10,000 Ancestral Puebloans once bartered salt with the Rio Grande Indians for cotton products, squash and beans and with plains Indians for hides, flints and buffalo meat.

The three missions, Abo, Quarai and Gran Quivara are unlike any other New Mexico missions in that they were built with small flat stones much like the pueblos of northwest New Mexico notably Chaco Canyon.  This suggests trade or migratory connections between the regions.  And we do know that the ancestral Puebloans migrated in a counter clockwise direction from central New Mexico to northern New Mexico into southern Colorado and southern Utah before dipping south into Arizona and finally Mexico.  So the premise of Chacoan style architecture starting in the Salinas Pueblos is entirely plausible.

Chaco or Abo?  You be the judge.

Dyed in the Wool

Wool plays a storied role in northern New Mexico Hispanic and Native American cultures.   It started with hearty Churra sheep brought from Spain by the Conquistadors in 1598.  The wooly critters provided both sustenance and warmth as they continue to do today.  That's particularly true on the Navajo Reservation where the sheep are now called Churro and you can get a mean Lamb Taco.  Try La Posada, the Mary Colter designed railroad hotel in Winslow, Arizona for a couple of those babies.

For 300 years 70% of the Rio Grande Valley's inhabitants earned their livelihood in the textile industry but that had all but died by 1900. Today there is a small, struggling wool industry in Taos, Chama and Mora.  At this writing two wool and weaving enterprises in Taos are closing or downsizing.  One, the handsome Weaving Southwest at Taos’s 100% corner that has offered magnificent rugs, brilliant yarns and looms for a couple of years is adopting a a less costly internet model and a small upstairs weaving studio half a mile west of the Plaza.  The other is closing for good.

But the heart of the wool and weaving culture still beats in the village of Mora 45 minutes east of Taos. There Tapetes de Lana, literally tapestries of wool, has soldiered on since 1998.  Started by Carla Gomez, Tapetes was founded to keep alive New Mexico’s wool history, to provide economic opportunity for the poor rural agricultural community and to keep young people in their ancestral homes. Though it has enjoyed some longevity fully half its workers and trainees are Anglos from afar.  So there’s yarn being made and rugs are being woven but not necessarily by the people for whom the opportunity was created.  It's a bittersweet coda to be sure.   

Still Tapetes de Lana is rich in the earthy textures of native wool and naturally dyed yarns and boasts a treasure trove of Industrial Revolution era spinning equipment in the factory out back.  The machines dating back to the 1880s are a visual feast of gears, bobbins and whirly gigs.

Cruz Blanca

La Morada de Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe in Taos is the largest and most important of the early 19th Catholic lay chapels that checker northern New Mexico and southern Colorado.  The morada has fallen into decay but repairs have begun to fill and seal its eroding visage.  Note the wire lathe that is ready for a fresh skin of mud, water and straw.

Hard Twist

I keep a hundred images or so ahead in my blog catalog. Started out three years or so ago with a small library and try to keep enough fodder to always have something worthy.  On Sundays I scan the stored photographs to see what grabs me.  It's always a kind of surprise.  What I'll pick.

This week's selection, Hard Twist, appealed to me because of the composition and because the shallow depth of field pushes the eye to the wire which is sharp for about six inches.

F Troop

Fort Union, the largest Army fort and supply depot in the southwest, was so critical that it was built three times starting in 1851. The first couple of times the soldiers did it themselves with green wood and greener skills.  The successful construction of the third fort in the traditional “Territorial” style employed skilled Hispano craftsmen using aged native lumber, clay and stone and a strong local cash economy emerged.  

Without stockades or ramparts the fort looked more like a small frontier town with streets set at right angles and a population of soldiers, officers and their families. A substantial hospital served not only the military community but the local population. 

Fort Union was emblematic of “Manifest Destiny” and heralded American expansionism in the southwest during the mid-nineteenth century.  It was first established to defend Indian attacks that threatened the westward thrust of pioneers along the Santa Fe Trail and several rutted pathways where buckboards and prairie schooners once passed are visible crossing the fort’s 53 square miles of grassland.

Knowingly or otherwise Fort Union was built on private land within the Mora Land Grant and despite twenty years of legal challenges the rightful owners were paid exactly zero for their property, a result not entirely unprecedented in the annals of our Westward Ho moment.

Then In a pithy turnabout is fair play episode early in the Civil War Confederate forces that had already occupied Santa Fe wanted to capture Fort Union. They marched eastward before being intercepted and beaten by a garrison from the fort and militiamen from southern Colorado.  And so The Battle of Glorietta Pass ended the Confederate incursion into New Mexico and its troops retreated back to Texas.  

Fort Union lies just north of Watrous and about five miles west of I-25, the main route between Albuquerque and Denver.  Hold on to your hat.  It blows like a banshee.

More Cold Traveling

I have just discovered that three new photographers have been added to Cold Traveling.  They are Pascal Shirley of Venice Beach, California, Dave Skinner of Burlington, Ontario (an old haunt of mine) and Eamon McMahon from, in his words, somewhere between Montreal and Toronto.  This darn thing is getting bigger by the minute.

Below are images from each photographer that demonstrate the wealth of subjects and styles in the show.

David Skinner

Keith Dotson

Loren Haury

Eamon McMahon

Pascal Shirley

Steve Immel

Cold Traveling

Starting on Wednesday February I will be part of an online exhibition entitled Cold Traveling in which three very different takes on winter will be shown.  My images are from my Sketches of Winter portfolio while Loren Haury contributes his gorgeous abstract photographs of ice formations in Oak Creek near his Sedona home and Tennessee's Keith Dotson provides his luminous winter landscapes and quirky nudes.  I’m delighted to be in their company.

The exhibition is hosted by Toronto’s Garland and Ford Gallery which was established last year to present the finest in traditional and contemporary photography.  Based on previous shows I’d say the emphasis is strongly on the latter.  Click on www.garlandandford.com Wednesday.

Buried Bough

Because it's, well, winter it's high time I posted an image from my Sketches of Winter portfolio.  This one is the poster child for the series of minimalist photographs that have been compared to pen and ink drawings or sketches.  Hence the name.

This one was taken at Valles Caldera above Los Alamos on the way to the Jemez Pueblo.  Winter or summer it's vast and beautiful and a favorite spot for wintery goodness.

Hubbard Squash

This photograph of gnarly Hubbard Squash is one of the images that made my switch from film to digital a fait accompli  Taken in a fine mist under a brooding fall sky the squash gained texture, volume and weight.

Battery Godfrey

A WWI era bunker called Battery Godfrey sits atop a bluff just above the Pacific and a few hundred feet west of the Golden Gate Bridge.  Pea soup fog hugs the Presidio of San Francisco and the air is heavy with briny richness.

Goodness and Light

I’ve failed to post on Sunday yet again.  In this case I may be forgiven since I was attending the memorial for Marcia Harris Sewell, my longest standing college friend.  Fifty one years to be precise.  She and I were both folk singers in the halcyon early sixties.  Marcia enjoyed a measure of success as a member of one of the large New Christy Minstrel style groups of the era and later became an illustrator and painter following in the footsteps of her father Robert J. Harris.  Despite those artistic genes her real calling was caring for others before self, a trait her friends both rued and respected.  The common thread through the dozens who shared memories of her Sunday was her goodness.  That she might have been entirely good puts her in rather rare company I think.

I don’t have a specific image that depicts that goodness or one of the memorial (though I took many) so I’m sharing one of Marcia and her daughter Lisa several years ago in Taos.  This image shows love, joy and Marcia's eternal youth. 

 She's on the right at sixty plus with Lisa in her thirties.  Mother and daughter and sisters, too.