Historic Taos photos among those sold by retiring Santa Fe Plaza vendor
Sometime around the turn of the 20th century, B.G. Randall took a photograph of four men in Taos Pueblo standing around an archery range. In March 1996 on his first day as a full-time vendor on the Santa Fe Plaza, Randall’s great grandson, Cliff Mills, sold a black-andwhite print of the photo, which former pueblo Gov. Tony Reyna named “Target Practice,” for $20. “It was a really cold and blustery day and I wasn’t dressed for it,” Mills said. “It was my first day and all I made was 20 bucks. I remember thinking, ‘Oh, shoot, what have I done?’ ”
Over the next 23 years, Mills had many better days selling modern transformations of his great-grandfather’s historic photographs in the shade of the plaza’s cottonwood trees. But on Friday (June 14) the 68-yearold sold his final pieces of art in Santa Fe before relocating to a hospice in Las Cruces.
“He knew the personal backstory about every photograph that was in his space. He knew about the original image and his own process for creating something new,” said Lynda Feman, who sold ceramics from the booth next to Mills for the past 20 years. “He was a historian of Northern New Mexico.”
Mills said B.G. Randall, his great-grandfather, took photographs as a mining engineer in Taos in the early 1900s, and in 1978, his grandmother showed him the family collection of her father’s pictures. In 1995, Mills said he was managing the souvenir department at Woolworth, which has since become Five & Dime, when he decided to sell his work on the plaza full time. Mills said he used to develop his grandfather’s black-andwhite photos in a darkroom before hand-tinting them with acrylic, oil or pastel paints.
In 2004, he said he started experimenting with digital versions of both his great grandfather’s and his own photos of New Mexico’s people and nature. “I was always bored with conventional photography. My idea of being successful was to be as different as I could be,” said Mills, who graduated from Los Alamos High School in 1968. “My authenticity came from the fact that I came from a family of photographers and always explained my process and my materials.”
On Friday morning, Mills said he was discharged from the hospital, where he had been recovering from a fall in his home and two mild heart attacks. Before moving to Las Cruces to be closer to his sister and at a lower altitude, he returned to Santa Fe Plaza to sell a few final works. Most of the other vendors bought a photograph so they could remember Mills. A pedicab driver gave him a free ride around the plaza.
And in the end, Mills said the oil tint of “Target Practice” was his final sale. He made $55.