Laura Gilpin western woman

pentaxuser said:

What toners were used? A lot of the prints seem to be pinkish in tone as if they are lith. I was going to say what toners did she use when I realised that nothing is said about whether she did her own printing or not hence I use "were used"

Thanks

pentaxuser

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Andrew O'Neill said:

I believe she did a lot of platinum printing.

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DREW WILEY said:

One has to keep in mind that some of the tribes really dislike each other. For example, the Navajo were regarded as invaders by the previous Hopi, who trace their ancestry to the Anasazi. Then the way the government thoughtlessly lumped them into close proximity exacerbated the issue. I grew up with Indians of a different lineage, but that still allowed me to get a rapport with a few Navajo who invited us to see certain things otherwise off-limits to outsiders. I never photograph anyone without their express permission, so they weren't worried about that kind of thing. As per the book, I have a first-edition hardbound, and the images are especially well printed on soft-looking paper, reminiscent of that velvety watercolor-paper look Laura is said to have preferred for her actual prints .

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DREW WILEY said:

Try telling them that, not me.

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pentaxuser said:

Thanks Drew, so "normal" platinum prints do not have this pinkish hue but this is the result of either discolouration or the various papers might have had this intrinsic hue about them? I think I recall seeing platinum prints in the past and I can't recall seeing this subtle but distinctive pinkish colour. Not that it looked bad of course

pentaxuser

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DREW WILEY said:

No, just read descriptions. It would be nice to travel to where the real deal exists, but it won't likely happen.... As for your other remark, I have plenty of contact with things going on around here. Sure, there are a number of wannabee Indians and politically correct neo-hippie pseudo-Indians inventing generic cultural values as ridiculous as those seen in old John Wayne movies, or concocted fictitious tribes for sake of casino licenses, but that's another category of thing entirely. I've explored Anasazi canyons somewhat, and am convinced that inter-clan rivalries were behind the peak of paranoia when they were living way up on the cliffs, regardless of their hypothetical specific ethnicities. But my own quite extensive background in my earlier years was in North American ice age archaeology, long long before any of that. Direct ethnographic knowledge came from growing up with Paiute-origin Indians who invaded the West slope of the Sierras and drove out previous tribes. Some of my friends own grandparents had grown up aboriginal prior to white contact, and still harvested acorns in our yard every autumn. Many spoke no English at all, and that was the case with most of the little kids on the school bus; but they learned fast. A few old friends of mine have set up a small school to teach some of the local original dialect and actual customs and lore, in diametric contrast to the nearby colony of generic hippie Indians, whose baskets and beads look more like something purchased at a mall craft store. The gold rush was slightly further north, and the Spanish genocides lower down in the Central Valley, so the locals never really were subdued, but mostly integrated through employment and adopting parallel lifestyles like ranching and logging. Many did quite well, but not so much those on the little reservations, where alcoholism along with domestic violence killed most off. The typical lifespan went from well over 100 years in the grandparent generation, to less than 30 in mine.

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1. I have no idea where all the research papers ended up. The safe was raided, as I'll explain in a moment. I was a heretic back then, claiming the New World was peopled mainly via the coast starting at least 18,000 yrs ago. The culture was fairly sophisticated and capable of a degree of seafaring, and I had quite a bit of solid proof. But I was a precocious teenager whose ideas were not popular with the established cronies, who were all convinced a bunch of Alley Oops staggered down the middle of the continent routinely munching on elephants, and then spread outward from New Mexico because that just happens to be where the dust bowl blowouts exposed the first discovered mammoth kills! The whole "Clovis culture" thing was a ritualistic cult that spread very fast and far, not an ethnic lifestyle. Killing those critters was a big deal, and no doubt dangerous too. But nobody bothered to look for the actual campsites where people ground nuts and acorns, and fed on rabbit or deer or fish most of the year. An elephant kill was more like our Thanksgiving, but with all of Grandma's expensive fine China and silverware ritually left behind.
2. So I got encouragement from leading geomorphologists and paleontologists, precisely because they despised the humanities-based methodology of the anthropologists and archaeologists of that time. I was perhaps the first person in this country to seriously study lithics technology, though that really began in Siberia. Then a major prehistorian who came over from Africa got interested in what I was doing. I never finished the dissertation because I outright despised the fuddy-duddy system myself. All of that has dramatically changed in recent decades, and even the coastal migration route is now the predominant theory, with even the smoking gun of very ancient island sites being found, proving sea commuting. But it turns out somebody else had hypothesized all that twenty years before me, and all his work was ignored, and then rediscovered on the verge of being destroyed when his old garage attic was cleaned out,
3. My documentary photos, along with the ancient coastal artifacts, were stolen along with most of my art collection. All that was then sold to a fence for drug money. Then he shot a cop in the city, escaped to the woods, then managed to shoot down a police helicopter and kill everyone aboard. So now they were really pissed off. He was holed up in a tiny shack on the Res when one of the Indians tipped off authorities. Surrounded by over 200 swat team members, he finally rushed out guns blazing and was instantly turned into Swiss cheese. So nobody will ever know where those things went. I don't talk about the rest of the collection for security reasons. It was just one of my numerous intense phases anyway. Photography has stuck with me longer. But if you get ahold of a copy of the old Sierra Club book, Almost Ancestors, Earliest Photographs of California Indians, there are three people in there I personally knew. There's a particularly interesting picture of a little girl who grew up to be a neighbor, and I went to school with her son. The old tintypes and ambrotypes of local Indians have been given to the next generation of the family. My knowledge of SW culture is more related to canyoneering observations rather than formal study.

AndyH said:

I did some work in water and sewer financing and development in the Navajo Nation back in the early 1980s, as a consultant and advocate with a non-profit NGO. Times were very different then, but it was a pleasure seeing the young leadership generation emerging.

Andy

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DREW WILEY said:

1. I have no idea where all the research papers ended up. The safe was raided, as I'll explain in a moment. I was a heretic back then, claiming the New World was peopled mainly via the coast starting at least 18,000 yrs ago. The culture was fairly sophisticated and capable of a degree of seafaring, and I had quite a bit of solid proof. But I was a precocious teenager whose ideas were not popular with the established cronies, who were all convinced a bunch of Alley Oops staggered down the middle of the continent routinely munching on elephants, and then spread outward from New Mexico because that just happens to be where the dust bowl blowouts exposed the first discovered mammoth kills! The whole "Clovis culture" thing was a ritualistic cult that spread very fast and far, not an ethnic lifestyle. Killing those critters was a big deal, and no doubt dangerous too. But nobody bothered to look for the actual campsites where people ground nuts and acorns, and fed on rabbit or deer or fish most of the year. An elephant kill was more like our Thanksgiving, but with all of Grandma's expensive fine China and silverware ritually left behind.
2. So I got encouragement from leading geomorphologists and paleontologists, precisely because they despised the humanities-based methodology of the anthropologists and archaeologists of that time. I was perhaps the first person in this country to seriously study lithics technology, though that really began in Siberia. Then a major prehistorian who came over from Africa got interested in what I was doing. I never finished the dissertation because I outright despised the fuddy-duddy system myself. All of that has dramatically changed in recent decades, and even the coastal migration route is now the predominant theory, with even the smoking gun of very ancient island sites being found, proving sea commuting. But it turns out somebody else had hypothesized all that twenty years before me, and all his work was ignored, and then rediscovered on the verge of being destroyed when his old garage attic was cleaned out,
3. My documentary photos, along with the ancient coastal artifacts, were stolen along with most of my art collection. All that was then sold to a fence for drug money. Then he shot a cop in the city, escaped to the woods, then managed to shoot down a police helicopter and kill everyone aboard. So now they were really pissed off. He was holed up in a tiny shack on the Res when one of the Indians tipped off authorities. Surrounded by over 200 swat team members, he finally rushed out guns blazing and was instantly turned into Swiss cheese. So nobody will ever know where those things went. I don't talk about the rest of the collection for security reasons. It was just one of my numerous intense phases anyway. Photography has stuck with me longer. But if you get ahold of a copy of the old Sierra Club book, Almost Ancestors, Earliest Photographs of California Indians, there are three people in there I personally knew. There's a particularly interesting picture of a little girl who grew up to be a neighbor, and I went to school with her son. The old tintypes and ambrotypes of local Indians have been given to the next generation of the family. My knowledge of SW culture is more related to canyoneering observations rather than formal study.

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