In better focus
Ex-assistant hopes to expand recognition for photographer Laura Gilpin with new biography
Sina Brush is trying to do her part to widen and deepen the recognition of the late photographer Laura Gilpin of Santa Fe. Brush’s main effort to promote Gilpin’s reputation is the publication of her partmemoir, part-biography “Working with Laura Gilpin, Photographer.”
Expanding the book’s personal touch is a large group of sensitively taken, mostly color photographs that Santa Fe’s J.B. Smith took of Gilpin, her modest home, her belongings and her photographic gear.
Gilpin’s fine-art photography has been praised by Ansel Adams, who was quoted as saying that she “is one of the most important photographers of our time.”
The 2017 “New Ground” exhibit at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Women in the Arts said during her lifetime Gilpin was referred to as the “grand dame of American photography.” The exhibit presented more than 40 Gilpin images of the Southwestern landscape and its people alongside 26 ceramic pieces by famed pueblo potter Maria Martinez and her family.
Gilpin was friends with famed fellow photographers Adams, Imogen Cunningham and photo-historian Beaumont Newhall. Gilpin’s name was sometimes mentioned in the same context as those of Mary Austin, a novelist, poet and playwright who lived in Santa Fe for many years, and Willa Cather, a Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist who wrote “Death Comes for the Archbishop.”
But Brush wrote in an email that Gilpin, who died in 1979, “is still described as a ‘regional artist.’ Her work sells for very little considering its vintage and quality. People limit her that way, thinking of ‘The Enduring Navaho’ as summing up her work. She made many photographs in France, classic in subject and style; no one mentions those. She was born on a ranch (in Colorado), and critics want to keep her there.”
Brush said Gilpin is largely known today for the iconic, elegant images in “The Enduring Navaho,” her 1968 book of black-and-white photographs, and the breathtaking aerials she took for her 1941 book “The Rio Grande: River of Destiny.”
Gilpin, Brush said, was the foremost American maker of platinum prints in her last years.
Brush, a painter and printmaker, worked for Gilpin in the last six years of Gilpin’s life in the gallery at the west end of Gilpin’s modest home on Camino del Monte Sol. “I dry-mounted and framed photos. I kept track of all sales and orders and was her personal secretary. I transcribed letters she dictated to me and mailed them to galleries and museums,” said Brush, who lives south of Santa Fe.
“People who knew her said that my perspective would be of interest because it was about her real self. Books that have been written about her were done from research. I pick that format (of Smith’s images followed by Brush’s text) because I wanted people to see her home. And then when they read my text they would know who I was talking about. So they could visualize as they read because ideally they would look at photographs (on the walls) of her home first.”
Brush lived in Albuquerque from ages 4 to about 20. At the University of New Mexico, she studied lithography, drawing and Spanish.
Brush speculated that Gilpin would have been surprised that the Smithsonian presented the exhibit a couple of years ago.
“She never thought people would appreciate her work,” she said.