Another "What is that camera?"

These pictures are part of the exhibit about Albuquerque's Special Collections Library.  They are printed from a large group of negatives in the Albuquerque Museum Photo Archives.

 The relevant clues are the camera shape, the controls on the top deck, the black lens barrel and the dates in the captions and in the Albuquerque Tribune article.

What is your guess?

Broken Boxes

 The large fabric and metal sculpture near the entrance to the current exhibition at the Albuquerque Museum drew a lot of favorable attention from visitors.  All of the pieces exhibited were expertly crafted, though their meaning  and relatability  often seemed obscure to me.

 I first photographed the mother wolf figure with the Elmar 3.5/50 lens on my Leica IIIa.  I thought the resultant image on Kentmere 400 was quite good.  However, I wanted to better show the large scale of the piece, so I went back on another day with the Jupiter 12 2.8/35mm.  That did give me some images that better illustrated the liveliness and the context and proportionality compared to human dimensions.  The very low light level made it a challenging undertaking.

 The "Broken Boxes" title of the exhibit came from a podcast consisting of ten years of interviews with artists, including those in the current exhibition.  Even after reading some of the explanations on site, the show title still required some clarification for me.  A friend who is a docent at the museum suggested that the title terms could be similar to the concept of "out of the box" as the artists were all indigenous and were challenging prevalent ideas about their cultures.

The artists that created the wolf sculpture are Cannupa Hanska Luger and Marie Watt.

Between Two Worlds

Lee Marmon - ca.1990 - photographer unknown

We went to the Albuquerque Museum this morning to see the Lee Marmon exhibit, Between Two Worlds. There is a small but representative selection of Marmon's work. The narrative commentary at the front of the exhibit is disappointing because it just parrots a tiring, contrived comparison of the work of Marmon to his predecessors, Edward Curtis and Charles Lummis.

There is no arguing the fact that Lee Marmon, a native son of the Laguna Pueblo, had easy access to his Native American subjects which made them comfortable in front of his camera. Contrary to the assertions made in the exhibit, however, there is very little real difference between his photographic approach and techniques and those of Curtis and Lummis.

The exhibit material implies that Curtis and Lummis were condescending toward their Native American subjects, and that they misrepresented them as members of a disappearing race. I  don't recall reading anything said by either that portrayed their subjects with any negativity. Curtis endured great hardship in documenting all the tribal groups he could find and never realized any significant income from his efforts.  Lummis lived in the Isleta Pueblo and clearly enjoyed the trust and affection of his neighbors.

As for the portrayal of the American Indians as in danger of disappearance toward the end of the 19th Century, I think we can cut Curtis and Lummis some slack. The indigenous people of the country had by that time been subjected to a couple centuries of genocidal warfare. Additionally, it has become increasing clear that well into the Twentieth Century there was a concerted effort undertaken jointly by the government and religious organizations to stamp out indigenous languages and cultures by ripping the children away from their families and confining them in prison-like boarding schools. (Marmon ran away from the Albuquerque Indian School.)

The charge that Curtis and Lummis posed their subjects, sometimes using artificial lighting, simply overlooks the realities of 19th Century photography.  Curtis and Lummis made their photographs on glass plates using large and cumbersome view cameras. Spontaneous snapshots of everyday life were not a practical option, though Lummis actually got pretty close to that with some of his cyanotypes. 

Marmon made most of his pictures of Pueblo people in outdoor settings and had no need for artificial lighting.  He did often use a somewhat cumbersome press camera, but it was loaded with film that was vastly more sensitive than those 19th Century glass plates of his predecessors. Marmon used flash for his commercial celebrity portrait work as was the custom in those days.

Curtis certainly did go to some lengths to portray his subjects mostly in traditional regalia which was not often seen outside ceremonial activities. But, guess what; most of Marmon's pictures of his people show them wearing traditional garb and jewelry which they clearly donned for the occasion. Not unsurprisingly, as the exhibit material points out, Marmon never had a negative thing to say about the photographic approaches of Curtis and Lummis. In fact, Marmon was doing his best to emulate the posing conventions of his day which were not all that different from the approaches of Curtis and Lummis.

It seems to me it should be possible to recognize what is unique and valuable in Marmon's accomplishments without trying to turn Curtis and Lummis into villainous antagonists in a way that Marmon himself never endorsed.

Museum Car Show

I took two cameras to photograph the yearly Albuquerque Museum car show.   First up was the Ansco Panda, my favorite box camera.  My plan was to use Fuji Acros in the camera, but the sky was overcast, so TMAX 400 seemed the better choice.  (Click the images to view full size.)

The Panda seems to me to be the perfect camera for shooting car shows.  It is small enough to stuff in a jacket pocket and the camera's short focal length provides a wide angle perspective I like.  Having to re-roll 120 film onto the 620 reels needed by the Panda is only a minor inconvenience.

Now is the Time

If you have ever been inclined to visit Albuquerque this would be a good time, particularly if you are interested in Twentieth Century American Art and Art History.  I say this because I just visited the current exhibit at the Albuquerque Museum of Art, Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: American Moderns and the West.  This is a gigantic show with over 150 pieces related to Mabel Dodge Luhan and her artist friends who gravitated toward Taos, New Mexico in the first half of the last century. 

The exhibit started off at the Harwood Gallery in Taos; it will be in Albuquerque until January 22nd and will then go to Buffalo on March 10th.

As luck would have it I came across a copy of Mabel's biography at my local used bookstore and am about half way through it at the moment.  The author, Lois Rudnick, is one of the curators of the exhibit.

While the show has virtually something for everyone given Mable's vast circle of friends, what interested me of course was the photography.  There are fine examples in the show of work by Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand and many others.  A portrait of Tony Lujan, Mabel's last husband, has made me rethink my ideas about Adams who has worn a bit thin for me, particularly his later portraits.  The Lujan picture is very strong and clearly shows the influence of Strand who mentored Adams in Taos.

Tony Lujan, Taos, New Mexico 1929 by Ansel Adams

Visualizing Albuquerque

The Visualizing Albuquerque exhibit runs from January 31 to May 3, 2015 at the Albuquerque Museum of Art.  It was not until my second visit that I noticed the sign out front said that photography is allowed at this show.  So I snapped a few shots with Tri-X in my Zorki 2-C, mounted with the Jupiter 12 lens.

Mildred Murphey. "Self Portrait", Aluminum

Ford Model T Speedster (1912)

I have taken quite a few photographs at the near-by Natural History Museum over the past few years.  Photography is not normally permitted in the Art Museum, so this exhibit presents an unusual opportunity to explore the museum experience.  I'll likely return several times with my cameras to try a variety of techniques.

Auténtico

This is the announcement from the web site of the Albuquerque Museum for Robert Christensen's exhibit which will be there until mid-March.

Vernacular Architecture of New Mexico: Photographs by Robert Christensen
Sept. 21, 2013 – March 16, 2014

In 52 stunning black and white photographs, Belen-based photographer Robert Christensen has documented in a spare compositional format, spontaneously designed buildings such as gas stations, garages, barns, bars, sheds, and shops.

The artist states, "While quite a few of these buildings still stand, as a genus they are fading away, along with the individualism and self-reliance that produced them. Some have been replaced by mundane new construction, some have been chicly remodeled at the expense of their original allure, and some have just vanished."

This installation includes recent prints of images created from 1974 through 2013 which were donated by the artist to the Albuquerque Museum.
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I'm a long-time follower of Robert Christensen's work on Flickr.  Many of the photos in the Museum show can be seen in his Flickr stream.  Some of the pictures will also be featured in an article in the November issue of New Mexico Magazine.  The show is worth a visit to see the actual prints, which are of very high quality.