Laura Gilpin western woman

[jtk]

One of America's most important photographers.

 

[jtk]

https://www.amazon.com/Enduring-Navaho-Laura-Gilpin/dp/B000Q9MCMO

 

[jtk]

 

[DREW WILEY]

She's one of my favorites. I have a hardcover copy of Enduring Grace, an especially well printed book. It wasn't exactly cheap when it first came out either. She factored into keeping platinum printing alive mid-century. And it was her unassuming rapport with the Navajo, and her personal respect for them, that allowed such intimate portraits.

 

[pentaxuser]

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

 

[Andrew O'Neill]

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

I believe she did a lot of platinum printing.

 

[pentaxuser]

I believe she did a lot of platinum printing.

Thanks Andrew, is it platinum printing that gives a lot of the pictures that pinkish hue? I take it from the way you replied that she did all her own darkroom work throughout her working life.

pentaxuser

 

[DREW WILEY]

Pt/Pd mixtures could produce various tones, depending, with the additional factor that she apparently experimented with various papers, some of which might have had a distinct underlying hue, or might have discolored hence. She also used a silver paper called Gevalux, known for its velvety surface and exceptionally deep blacks, but fragile to handling. She evidently gravitated toward more tactile aspects of the craft. In color, she did brief but lovely work in Autochrome as well as dye transfer. A real printmaker.

 

[pentaxuser]

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

 

[DREW WILEY]

Hard to say. Hand-coaters at that time might not have had access to the purity of ingredients we expect today, and trace elements can do all kinds of things. But she did various kinds of printing, and toners could have been involved. A specialist at the Amon Carter Museum would have to be asked, and even they might not know. Hi-tech testing might be warranted in determining the authenticity of some Old Masters painting, or in relation to crime scene forensics; but that kind of expense can rarely be justified when the trail back to the original artist is already apparent. Conservators just need to pigeonhole the medium enough to know how to best preserve it. Papers themselves are a complex subject. She might very well have experimented with coating slightly tinted papers. If you look at her very early monochrome work, it was strongly influenced by the Clarence White variety of pictorialism, versus the deadpan silver look that arrived with Strand and then the f/64 ethos.

 

[jtk]

Drew, thanks for your insights. :

"And it was her unassuming rapport with the Navajo, and her personal respect for them, that allowed such intimate portraits."

Yes, that's fundamental...When I first started to spend time with Navajo on reservation (a decade of archery competitions) I decided, fully intentionally, to simply allow personal relationships to develop over time... as equals rather than cultural phenomena. I put years of anthropology courses on ice from the first moment, knowing that Navajo had suffered more from anthropological curiosity than any group other than Vietnamese (CIA anthropologists were used as weapons). Navajo asked many questions about me, as they do about anyone they respect, but I asked almost no questions about them. Over time I did learn a lot that way.

Navajo are suffering and dying today from Covid 19...possibly worse than any other group of Americans. Tribal police now block entry to the Reservation. I don't visit anymore.

 

[wyofilm]

There are several editions of her books. For example, hard bound and soft bound editions of her Enduring Grace exist on the used market at widely differing prices. For those of you that own one of them, can you comment on the publication quality. Thanks!

 

[DREW WILEY]

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 .

 

[jtk]

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 .

It's not useful for non-Navajo to ascribe tribal "dislikes" to Navajo Vs other tribes... American Indian Movement (AIM) in the 60s-70s helped different tribes find real communality. As for sharing "certain things," yes...that's also true with "us" (assuming we're not Navajo). There's a lot that I don't know about all sorts of religions and cultures. I enjoy Jews more than folks with some other religions/cultures and more than Jews may often enjoy each other..for ridiculous example

Not that it's important here, but "Anasazi" is no longer considered useful by archaeologists because it fails to recognize how diverse that once huge desert population actually was...https://indianpueblo.org/what-does-anasazi-mean-and-why-is-it-controversial/

 

[DREW WILEY]

Try telling them that, not me.

 

[jtk]

Try telling them that, not me.

Times change.

 

[jtk]

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

Did you see those "pinkish" prints in person or online? I've mostly seen a faint warmish tone, tho Avedon's and Penn's have always seemed perfectly neutral (gallery/museum lighting).

 

[DREW WILEY]

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.

 

[jtk]

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.

Drew, I don't mean to question your experience and expertise. My experience is entirely social and almost entirely on Rez in New Mexico. The Navajo people, whose archery events I enjoyed monthly for a decade prior to lockdown, are my age (76) or younger...the older men and women are open about their youth with American Indian Movement...some are still involved with Native American Church et al, but that's not traditional so may be vanishing..the younger people are typically athletic and or activists, such as around uranium and oil drilling waste...their extended families are mostly high school educated (better in NM than in AZ), typically in trades and their chapter houses are in NW New Mexico/NE Arizona but they have to travel long distances for work. Many still run a few cattle and the old women still tend sheep/goats. I'm well aware of their past and continuing legal hassles around land ownership (that very concept is anti-traditional for Navajo), but they seem to recognize common interests and I've never heard anything negative about other tribes. "Generic hippie indians" seem to have left the rez...they do get laughed about/

best, JK

 

[DREW WILEY]

Well, it is can certainly be rewarding if one is to a degree able to interact with memories of authentic tribal pasts. I'm just old enough to have heard first person stories by those who grew up completely aboriginal, prior to any white contact. The oldest Indian I knew was then 122, but was the very last of his tribe, so interviews inevitably involved attempts at translation by members of adjacent tribes whom he hated. Another old man, who did speak English, described crossing rugged high passes of the Sierra barefoot in his youth, with only a rabbit-skin blanket, on summer trips trading for obsidian on the eastern side. But he still had a bitter verbal feud going on with an old white guy in the neighborhood. It turns out they'd been shooting at each other way back when, when one was driving spikes for a narrow-gauge railroad around 1915, up where the Indians weren't entirely pacified yet, and obviously weren't amused by the intrusion. Barn and settlement burning raids were still going on even past the ghost dance cult episode, which was the very first pan-tribal movement bridging much of the West.

 

[jtk]

Drew.. recollections like yours are golden. Where have you written? Photos ?

 

[AndyH]

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

 

[DREW WILEY]

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.

 

[jtk]

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

Yes!

 

[jtk]

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.

Catch a few winks, thank you.

....and kids, remember this: The road to enlightenment is paved with excess.