The harsh light, sweeping panoramas, and sculpted pueblos of the American Southwest make it an ideal subject for photographers. For that reason, Americans have spent the last half century surrounded by images of red canyons, silhouetted cacti, highways stretching toward distant horizons, and cowboys astride tired steeds. These postcard icons have become part of a common visual shorthand used to discuss the idea of frontier, but in the early twentieth century such photographs were evidence of the exotic. The shooters who would define the region in the popular imagination had yet to arrive.
They came for many reasons. Photographers arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century in search of unspoilt wilderness, native tribes, clean light, and respite from increasingly crowded and dirty cities. But whatever the reasons were for their coming, the reason they all returned was the same: scale. Monument Valley, the Sonoran Desert, and even the ancient towns around Taos provided photographers with a chance to capture subjects in the context of deep time. For the initial group of artistically minded photographers who journeyed from New York to meet Georgia O'Keeffe, the wife of their famed gallerist Alfred Stieglitz, the place served as a laboratory for experimentation. For the artists that followed, it came to embody the size and possibility of America, serving as a stage for more human dramas.
The Southwest's significance in shaping photography as an artform is matched only by photography's significance in defining the region's identity. Here are the photographers who came to the desert with their cameras and left with a legacy.
Ansel Adams was on his way back to Santa Fe in his Pontiac station wagon after shooting in the Chama Valley when he saw the moon rising over a small town by the side of the highway. Ever impulsive and opportunistic, he pulled over to take a picture, calculating the correct exposure based on his memory of the luminancy of the moon. The resulting photograph, "Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico," is among the most famous to come out of Adams' 8x10 camera, and out of the Southwest.
New Mexico can take a large portion of the credit for Adams' career. He transitioned from being a dabbler with Sierra Club connections to being a full-time shooter during summers in Taos with Mary Austin, author of The Land of Little Rain. They collaborated on Adams' first published work, Taos Pueblo, and spent time with Paul Strand in the early Thirties, learning a new style of clear-eyed, unsentimental shooting. "It is all very beautiful and magical here, a quality which cannot be described," Adams wrote in a letter to the prominent photographer and gallerist Alfred Stieglitz. "You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake into you."
Adams would find later success in New Mexico, where he also caught memorable images of Ghost Ranch, Mesa Verde, and Georgia O'Keeffe. The dramatic landscape allowed him to create images with dramatic scale that didn't engage in trickery. Adams was happiest where hyperbole was unnecessary, so he returned regularly to the first landscape that had truly caught his eye, until he died in 1984.
Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico
Credit: J. Malcolm Greany