LAURA GILPIN. Desert Landscape, 1940s. 10.5 x 13.5" gelatin silver print, signed, printed 1970s, mounted on 16 x 20 mat board with window mat. Signature inscribed in pencil on window matte recto. Artist label on mount verso.

Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) photographed the American Southwest for more than sixty years, creating an extraordinary document of the land and its people. A contemporary of Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and Georgia O'Keeffe, she was unique among the women chroniclers of the Southwest in that photography was her medium of expression. She is particularly noted for her many fine landscape views of the four corners region of the American Southwest.
br>Gilpin was born on April 22, 1891 in Austin Bluffs, Colorado. After studying photography with Clarence White in New York she returned to Colorado to photograph the place she knew best. Through the early 1930's she produced a series of platinum and silver print masterpieces on textured paper in the pictorial tradition of Alfred Stieglitz, Clarence White, Edward Steichen, Gertrude Kasebier, and others. These photographs are exemplary of the finest early twentieth century Photo-Secession art movement. Beginning in the early 1930's and continuing throughout her life, she made sharper edged images of the Pueblo and Navaho Indians, and landscapes of unparalleled beauty of the Southwest. She moved to Santa Fe in the mid 1940s where she resided until her death in 1979. Andrew Smith, who grew up in Santa Fe, was a friend of Gilpin's in the 1970s, visiting with here and purchasing photographs from her. Her interest in architecture, sculptural form and cultural artifacts inspired three trips to the ruins of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan, for which she compiled photographs and wrote an accompanying text for the book Temples in Yucatan.

Throughout her life Gilpin worked on large projects with Southwestern themes, as well as publishing her photographs in a number of books. Her pictures of Pueblo Indians and Southwestern ruins in Colorado and New Mexico appeared in The Pueblos: A Camera Chronicle (Hastings House Publication, 1941). Her interest in architecture, sculptural form and cultural artifacts inspired three trips to the ruins of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan, for which she compiled photographs and wrote an accompanying text for the book, Temples in Yucatan: A Camera Chronicle of Chichen Itza (Hasting House Publishers, 1947). A few years later she published The Rio Grande: River of Destiny, an Interpretation of the River, the Land and the People (Duell, Sloan & Pearce, 1949).

Gilpin's most successful, rewarding, and historically important work was her documentation of the Navajo people, published in 1968 as The Enduring Navaho. In this book Gilpin observed, recorded, and interpreted, through her photographs and text, the lives of the Navajo people over an especially important time in Navajo history. In 1979 Gilpin made her last photographic trip flying in a small plane over the Rio Grande Valley. Her archive is housed at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

Excellent. Print condition excellent, minor foxing on window and base matte.