“The greatest tool at our command is the very thing that is photography. Light. Light is our paintbrush and it is a most willing tool in the hands of the one who studies it with a sufficient care.”
-- Laura Gilpin
Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) was famous for her American landscapes and photographic studies of the Navajo. According to a story by Martha A. Sandweiss, Laura Gilpin was unusual in that “No other woman in the history of American photography so devoted herself to chronicling the landscape.” She offered this quote by Gilpin to illustrate this passion:
"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."
Even when photographing the Navajo, she sees the people as inseparable from their land. To borrow from another story by Sandweiss: “Gilpin's book, The Enduring Navaho (1968), opens with an explicit statement about the relationship between the Dinéh and their land: ‘Within the boundaries of their 25,000-square-mile reservation, more than 100,000 Navaho People, the largest tribe of Indians in North America, are striving for existence on a land not productive enough to sustain their increasing population.’…The sequencing of the pictures underscores her text. Aerial views of the Navajo's four sacred mountains, conveying a sense of the larger physical world in which the people live, precede any portraits of the people themselves.”
What I admire about Laura Gilpin was her passion. It seems to be the common denominator in all really great photographers. What else could drive someone to work that tirelessly, doggedly, patiently returning again and again until you get it just right?
There is one other quality I admire in Gilpin.
During her later years until her death she lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where my mother, photographer Nancy Warren, met her. Laura Gilpin had attended my mother’s first show at a Santa Fe gallery. It was a collection of documentary photographs of Spanish Villages in New Mexico, mostly of the people that lived in the villages. Laura sent Nancy a note congratulating her on the show and suggesting that they meet sometime. They did and Laura was very encouraging to a younger photographer who greatly admired her. They attended another photo show together where Laura introduced Nancy to the photographer. This photographer, unlike Laura, was barely polite and couldn’t spare the time to talk to my mother. Laura whispered to Nancy “I like your people pictures better than his.”
The photographer was Ansel Adams.
Women
January 17, 2010
December 08, 2009
Margaret Bourke-White
“Nothing attracts me like a closed door. I cannot let my camera rest until I have pried it open, and I wanted to be first.”
---Margaret Bourke-White
One of my early female influences was Margaret Bourke-White. Not only did she have characteristics that I wanted to emulate as a photographer, but she also had a few qualities that I most certainly did not want. I learned from both.
I read two books about her life and both were great. One was her autobiography, “Portrait of Myself” and the other was “Margaret Bourke-White, A Biography” by Vicki Goldberg. It was particularly revealing to read both and to see the differences in how events were portrayed. That Margaret glossed over a few things and remembered her treatment of people a little more charitably in her autobiography gives you a clue as to what I was talking about above.
She was courageous, talented, determined, sexy, groundbreaking, and never took no for an answer. She was also single-minded, sometimes selfish, conceited, known to use her sex and tears to get what she wanted and was often rude and difficult to work with.
She was a woman—and a photographer—of firsts. She had the first cover photo of Life Magazine. She was the first female war correspondent (World War II) and among the first to photograph the newly liberated inmates at Buchenwald concentration camp. She was the only foreign photographer in Moscow when German forces invaded. She photographed Stalin, Patton, Gandhi, and many other limited-access subjects.
I loved her sense of composition in her early industrial photos, her streak of humanity in her depression series and her grasp of history in her war coverage. It was reading about her life that first brought home to me the difficulties that faced women trying to live the life of a photojournalist. Her solution was to work harder than most of her male colleagues and she never hesitated to use her femininity when she thought it would help her get what she wanted. But she never found a way to have her career and a family life at the same time. She had two brief marriages and no children. She knew herself well enough to choose career over family and never regretted it.
“…I needed an inner serenity as a kind of balance. This was something I could not have if I was torn apart for fear of hurting someone every time an assignment of this kind came up…Dashing off at a moment’s notice around the globe is wonderful if you are doing the dashing yourself. But if you are the one who stays behind, it must be hard to bear.”
Perhaps there would be fewer failed marriages if more people were insightful enough to make this kind of choice. My choice was similar but from an opposing camp. I chose family. That was my highest priority. So instead of covering wars, famine and exotic places, I covered hometown news, college sports, homeless, local politics and once in awhile I got sent to cover a hurricane or some national story in DC. I really can’t complain because there is just as much beauty, drama, emotion and history in local events as there is in international events. It’s just on a smaller scale and the people don’t dress differently and at the end of the day (or couple of days if it’s a big story) I got to go home to my family.
November 29, 2009
Georgia O'Keefe--True to Herself
My first look at a female artist is Georgia O’Keefe. I have included her even though she was a painter and not a photographer, because she has always been a tremendous influence in my work.
I saw an exhibit last year at the Georgia O’Keefe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, called “Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams: Natural Affinities”. It was fascinating to see the similarities between her work and Ansel Adams photographs. I found a video on YouTube about this exhibit that is worth watching.
Not only was she good friends with Ansel Adams, but she was married to Alfred Stieglitz, a pioneer in American modernist photography. There are many good biographies out there about her life so I won’t go into those details here, but my take away from her story is admiration for her wisdom and knowledge of her own needs. She was able to hear the voices inside herself and stay true to her art. She was determined to create good work and have it be judged by it’s own merits and not on the basis of her gender. She had the courage to take risks and do what she needed to do.
"To create one's own world in any of the arts takes courage." ---Georgia O'Keefe
