LAURA GILPIN Tree Shadows & Adobe 1949

LAURA GILPIN [Cottonwood Trees & Shadows, Adobe House, New Mexico], 1949, 7.5x9.5" Gelatin Silver Print on 14x11" board. Signed on mount below print lower right. ASG# LG/1565



Laura Gilpin made some of her greatest landscape photographs in the mid to late 1940s along the Rio Grande Valley of Colorado, New Mexico and Texas. Her photographs reveal her interest in shadow and light, land and sky, mass and air. In this view, and the next view of the same location, we see the dramatic differences in a small change of perspective and time.



Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) photographed the American Southwest for more than sixty years, creating an extraordinary document of the land and its people. A contemporary of Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and Georgia O'Keeffe, she was unique among the women chroniclers of the Southwest in that photography was her medium of expression.



Gilpin was born on April 22, 1891 in Austin Bluffs, Colorado. After studying photography with Clarence White in New York she returned to Colorado to photograph the place she knew best. Through the early 1930s she produced a series of platinum and silver print masterpieces on textured paper in the pictorial tradition of Alfred Stieglitz, Clarence White, Edward Steichen, Gertrude Käsebier and others. These photographs are exemplary of the finest early twentieth century photo-secession art movement. Beginning in the early 1930s and continuing throughout her life, she made sharper edged images of the Pueblo and Navaho Indians and landscapes of unparalleled beauty of the Southwest. She moved to Santa Fe in the mid 1940s where she resided until her death in 1979. Andrew Smith, who grew up in Santa Fe, was a friend of Gilpin's in the 1970s, visiting with here and purchasing photographs from her.



Provenance: From the collection of legendary Santa Fe American Indian Art and Trader Rex Arrowsmith, who was active from the late 1940s until his death in 2017.