Local Talent

Albuquerque has assembled an interesting cast of characters over its three hundred years.  Many have just passed through on the way to other places, while others have made the place a home.  One in the first category was Amelia Earhart who stopped over several times during cross-country flights.  I found a picture of her while browsing the Albuquerque Museum digital archive.  Amelia is the third from the left next to the pilot in this picture.

Albuquerque Museum  Photoarchives

Double Eagle II Airport - April 9, 2017

Albuquerque's Mayor Tingley is second from the right.  The fellow to the far right looks to be holding a crank-driven movie camera, possibly a 16mm Cine-Kodak.
    The group is assembled in front of a Ford TriMotor and this may have been the inaugural flight of Transcontinental Air Transport in 1929.  The story of that pioneer commercial air venture is well told in an article at Historynet.
     Albuquerque had two competing airports at the time; I think that shot may have been made at the one on the West Mesa which is now known as the Double Eagle II.  I made a picture of a restored TriMotor there a couple years ago with a Kodak Duo Six-20, the same model that Amelia had with her on her last flight in 1937.

wikipedia

Another aviator - who came and stayed - was Anne Noggle, quite an extraordinary person who flew in WWII and Korea and then became an author and a photographer after her retirement from the Air Force.  Noggle earned a master's degree in art at UNM and taught there from 1970 to 1984.  A book about her photography was recently published, Flight of Spirit: The Photographs of Anne Noggle.  She was an accomplished portraitist whose work focused mainly on the aging process of women.  I'm looking forward to getting to know her photography better through the new book and some of her previous ones about aviation.

Walter McDonald - Abq Journal

Tomorrow I will be attending the opening of an exhibit of yet another Albuquerque photographer, Walter McDonald, who was hired in 1969 by the Albuquerque Museum's first director to undertake a massive street photography project about the city.  McDonald's work for the project was all done over about eight months on 35mm color slide film.  Costs and a difficult relationship between the museum director and his board almost aborted the original plan for a big multi-projector show at the museum's first home at the Albuquerque Sunport.
    The most surprising part of the complicated story seemed to me to be the fact that at some point consideration was given to destroying the whole collection.  Fortunately, that idea was rejected by cooler heads at the museum and the slides were squirreled away in a box for two decades before being found again by an archivist who made digital copies of all of them.  About one hundred prints from the collection will be on display in the current show, Let The Sunshine In.  The whole story is nicely recounted in an Albuquerque Journal article.

Walter McDonald, Teenage Girls on Central Avenue, 1969, 35mm color slide, Albuquerque Museum, PA1996.029.192

Postscript:
McDonald still does some photography, but his main source of income these days seems to be building sand castles.  His autobiography is on Flickr.