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.

Arroyo Seco Glow Redux

Here from the department of redundancy department is another wish for a joyous holiday season and a bountiful and healthy 2012. 

Feliz Navidad

This isn't high art but is the heavenly view from Casa Immel. Taos Mountain looms snowy and majestic in the background.

Have a cozy Christmas with those you love.

Off the Cuff

The photographs Blessing of the Horses and Rough Rider are from Guanajuato state in the heartland of Mexico. They are part of an exhibit Off the Cuff that opens at the Minneapolis Photo Center on January 20 and runs through February 26.

The exhibition is described by London based juror Madeline Yale as "demonstrating the complex role photography plays as a witness and accomplice in seeing the world.”  These are spontaneous and unrehearsed moments in time captured by the eye of camera, fleeting and never to occur just that way again.  Much of the work in the show falls in the category of street photography: fly on the wall imagery with the photographer as observer of life’s story.

Roussillon Colors

Back when the baking summer sun beat down on Roussillon I posted several photographs from Le Conservatoire des Ocres.    As you probably know Roussillon is famed for its seventeen magnificent pigments.  The images below show particularly robust applications of these intense pigments on a crude weaving and a wall in the village. The weaving and the mottled wall make for most painterly abstracts.

  

These are both part of Hearts and Stars, a benefit art exhibition with proceeds going the Taos Men’s Shelter and to Shared Table, a worthy effort to feed the hungry in our artistically rich but economically challenged community.  The event began Saturday night and continues through December 9 at Wilder Nightingale Fine Art, 119 Kit Carson Road in Taos.  What a great way to buy well priced small works and help your fellow man.  

The vast empty plains and high desert continue apace.  Just can’t stop myself.  I’m taken by the effect a crude fence and gate can have on a barren landscape. Without them there’s not much going on but with them a narrative unfolds.  When, why and where does the path beyond lead?  It's a story the viewer can weave.  An interpretation residing between the ears.

Antonito Aluminum

Removing context is a sweet alchemy. This is geometric and abstruse in the best sense. There's an illusion of flatness since the grays aren't graduated. If you wonder what it is, it works.

Wagons Ho

Deep ruts cut through dry grass toward the low hills near Cline's Corner.  One conjures images of prairie schooners and hardy pioneer folk crossing the prairie to the promise of a better life.

Praire Fever

Afflicted as I am by a yearning for furrowed earth my auto pilot sometimes points east toward Texas and Oklahoma.  Once you cross the Sangre de Cristos the transition from the high desert to the grasslands of eastern New Mexico is so gradual it’s difficult to say just where scrubland becomes open range.  East of Springer a well ventilated hip roof and a sprawling farmstead speak of grass fed beef and summer wheat. 

Parallel Universes

Oops! I am late.  I missed my Sunday post for the first time in a couple of years.

Early in our French adventure my good friend photographer Daryl Black emailed me about  the stone work in the medieval castles and churches I was photographing and the pueblos of northern New Mexico.  Not only were the materials and processes comparable but so too were the eras in which the castles, churches and pueblos buildings emerged.  In this juxtaposition are Sabron du Ponteves in Bargeme and Pueblo del Arroyo in Chaco Canyon.  The similarities in 1,000 year old ruins 5,000 miles apart are startling.

Convergence

In my first post of the post-France era what better subject than the venerable and aesthetic Ranchos Church more properly known as San Francisco de Asis.  Here yet another effort to show it differently, no mean task with an edifice that’s been photographed about 7 million times. Then, too, it continues the architectural exploration that so dominated my Provence posts.  The single viga top left is the punctum of this serene image.