¡Colores!; Laura Gilpin: The Enduring Photographer

KNME-TV (Television station : Albuquerque, N.M.) · April 2001

“Ours is a new art, a most wonderful art. It is for us of the living generation to add to what has been done as a heritage for the future.” -Laura Gilpin. At the intersection of Art and Nature stands a tall western woman with brilliant white hair and the enduring conviction to capture the essence of life itself in the vast landscapes of New Mexico. She was Laura Gilpin – master photographer and one hell of a turkey farmer. This ¡Colores! celebrates the life and work of Laura Gilpin, an artist who’s career spanned 76 years yet who worked most of that time in obscurity. With a pragmatic mind, an insightful eye and a compassionate heart, Laura Gilpin was a distinct voice in the great photographic endeavor of the 20th century – to define and understand the American west. Through a detailed retrospective of her unique photographs, from her rare autochromes and exquisite platinum landscapes to her gentle portraits of Navajo life, learn how unlike her contemporaries, Laura Gilpin interpreted her surroundings as relationships between land and people rather than landscapes devoid of human existence. Experience Laura Gilpin’s remarkable ability to connect these dynamic and sometimes fragile relationships of life in the west to the inner and universal landscape of humanity. “She probably had the most thoroughly committed grasp of her medium and its importance to her of any photographer who ever lived, but she understood to the last that photography in all its wonder and spiritual potential was meaningless if it failed to be simply a means to the end of experiencing and appreciating what it meant to be human.” -Richard Rudisill, Curator of Photography History Museum of New Mexico. And then there were the turkeys. Although one of American’s greatest photographers, Laura Gilpin struggled throughout her life to sustain a livelihood. Never one to complain, she did what was necessary to make a living including creating a portrait studio, selling her work as postcards, writing and illustrating her own books, and, early in her life, developing a successful poultry farm to finance her education at the Clarence White School. Resourceful, reserved, good humored and tenacious, Laura Gilpin remains one of New Mexico’s quiet treasures. Learn about her life, her work and her legacy on ¡Colores! through interviews with the southwest’s most influential photographers and historians – James Enyeart, Eleanor Caponigro, Anne Noggle – and with an extensive look at her extraordinary photograph work. Funded in Part by New Mexico Arts.