History in the Taking
Photography and Perception in Envisioning Hispanic Santa Fe
#009920 Courtesy Palace of the Governors
Anderson Studio portrait of Mrs. Cleotas Martinez Jaramillo in her wedding hat, 1901.
Each winter in the tiny New Mexico town of Ranchos de Taos, a few miles south of Taos, Hispanic residents convene at the Santuario de San Francisco de Asis for the annual Matachines dances. Like their Native American neighbors in Taos Pueblo, for a portion of these events “the gente dress in buckskin and feathers and sing their oldest songs on tribute to their indigenous mestizo heritage,” photographer Miguel Gandert told art historian Lucy Lippard in his 2000 photography book Nuevo México Profundo. For him, the 150-year-old reenactment of historic struggles between Comanche and New Mexicans is not only a prime visual opportunity; it is an embodiment of the mixing that lies at the heart of Northern New Mexican culture.
It is also a means by which Gandert defies decades-old conceptions of New Mexico as a place where three cultures—Anglo, Hispanic, and Native American—coexist without blending. The Española-born and Santa Fe–raised artist has built a career on altering Santa Fe’s relationship with the art of photography, one that remains inextricably linked to the city’s history as a center for tourism and is now receiving attention in the far-reaching Palace of the Governors exhibition Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe. A photographic history of the town that debuted in November and runs through October 2009, the show in many ways says more about those behind the camera than about the people and places captured on film.
By the time cameras arrived in the Southwest, around 1850, Santa Fe was already 250 years old. Founded as part of the Spanish empire, it spent much of the early 19th century as a province of Mexico before being annexed by the United States in 1848. By the early 20th century, travelers and artists were arriving from the East, often fixated by the Native Americans living in the area and tending to photograph them in ways that were consistent with the popular image of the “noble savage.” People of Hispanic heritage, however, were harder to stereotype. “The American population from back East saw Native American culture as primitive and exotic, but because Hispanics had some tie to European culture,” says Charlie Carrillo, an internationally renowned santero who lives in Santa Fe, “we weren’t sexy enough” to become iconic. “Some of us weren’t dark enough, some had red hair and blue eyes, some had dark eyes and dark hair, and that wasn’t as appealing as Native Americans.” Presented with that kind of ethnic complexity, Carrillo asks, “what do you do?” Maybe, he suggests, “you ignore them.”
Talented artists, especially painters, began flocking to Santa Fe and Taos in the 1880s and ’90s, many on assignment for publications such as Harper’s Weekly. The most visible artists of the period, like Oscar Berninghaus, Ernest Blumenschein, and Joseph Henry Sharp, largely painted Native American subjects. But the artists’ focus on Pueblo people left out the broad spectrum of Hispanic life in the area. “There was a very wealthy Hispanic community here, so you see in the photo record many Hispanic people who would put on their Sunday finest and have a portrait made, whether it was for a wedding or something else,” explains Mary Anne Redding, the curator of photography at the Palace of the Governors, who helped to select the images for Through the Lens. Nonetheless, this group rarely appears in paintings from that era.
Instead, the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railroad, which began delivering curious tourists to New Mexico in 1879, consistently depicted Santa Fe as an Indian village filled with turquoise-laden girls carrying water pots on their heads, or Native men in blankets and moccasins. Well into the mid-20th century, its brochures, posters, and advertising materials (often displaying commissioned artists’ work, beginning in 1903) had an enormous impact on the way Americans viewed, and artists portrayed, its oldest capital city. According to Carmella Padilla, a Santa Fe native and former board president of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, it’s not hard to see the appeal of Native Americans in New Mexico. “If you went to Taos Pueblo, you saw a striking image of this really ancient population, whereas Hispano New Mexicans were farmers and everyday people. The architecture of the Pueblos, the elaborate feast days and dances—it was easier to put that into a box and create a story and a legend around it,” she says.
“What tourism does is create a fantasy, and that’s been enormously important to our economy,” says anthropologist Sylvia Rodriguez, a professor at the University of New Mexico since 1988. “What these images tell you about is the imagination of the people who created them, not what was really going on here.” While the artists who worked in Santa Fe carefully crafted romantic scenes of the region’s inhabitants, photographers were able to capture a more realistic picture of life in the town. “Photographers who were photographing landscapes and people on the street show Hispanic people and Anglo people as workers and as participants in society, but neither are romanticized in the same way as Native Americans,” Redding says. “The painters saw what they were looking for,” says Rodriguez. “They screened out stuff that wasn’t pretty—all of the ravages of colonialism, alcoholism, and poverty. You don’t sell paintings that way.”
As Through the Lens illustrates, photography helped broaden the range of images of Santa Fe that were presented to the world. As the medium’s technologies became more popular and accessible, the selective visions of the railway and the artists’ colonies gave way to a realism that more accurately revealed the blending of cultures that had always been part of life in Santa Fe. While railway brochures touted a region offering “romance of the conquistadors,” photographs of the city allowed the folks who lived here to show everyday life as it really happened. This includes lesser-known images by notable photographers, such as T. Harmon Parkhurst and Edward Curtis, used to tell a truly complex story about the history of Santa Fe—one that is often overlooked by those who live here, and unknown to those who come to visit. But perhaps more important is the way the show includes contemporary Hispanic and Native American photographers beside canonized images by Curtis and Ansel Adams.
This is possible, in part, because of the recognition Hispanic culture began to find through the unique forms of Spanish Colonial art that had been produced in the city for centuries. In 1949, University of New Mexico Press published art historian Roland Dickey’s beautifully illustrated volume, New Mexico Village Arts. “It was right after that you really see people taking an interest in Hispanic arts and culture,” explains Carrillo. Yet although that interest had already resulted in the creation, in 1925, of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society and its associated collections, the organization kept its focus on traditions that some felt put too much emphasis on Spanish heritage, ignoring the evolution of contemporary artists.
New Deal artist programs also helped promote Hispanic arts. But, says Gandert, whose photos of this region’s Hispanic communities have been exhibited at the Smithsonian, similar restrictions applied. “When the Works Progress Administration was here, Hispanics weren’t allowed to make paintings. They were told to make santos and traditional furniture.” And even without such rigid rules, Padilla—who helped with the 2002 opening of the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art—sees a danger in using one standard to try to represent a culture that is multifaceted and has many points of view, many opinions, many kinds of creativity and expression.
Outside observers still have a hard time understanding the complex history of New Mexico and the blend of cultures that has existed here for 400 years. “They don’t know how to separate us from Mexico,” Carrillo says. “Giving us an identity that is New Mexican is difficult. There’s nothing wrong with saying, ‘We’re Spanish, we’re Native American, we’re everything.’ We have all that going on in our culture, but I’ve been at Spanish Market now for 30 years and on many occasions people have come up and stood there looking right at the santos and said, ‘What tribe are you from?’ I say, ‘What planet did you arrive from?”
Although many Hispanic artists in Santa Fe relished the attention given to their santos, colcha embroidery, and tinwork, a generation of younger, Civil Rights–era artists rebelled against the stifling, static interpretation of Hispanic art imposed by the Society. That rebellion, and the relative success of contemporary Hispanic artists such as folk carver Luis Tapia, Padilla’s husband, eventually contributed to a more accurate understanding of Hispanics in Santa Fe. Tapia, a self-taught woodworker whose work fuses traditional Catholic imagery with motifs like lowriders and graffiti, was asked to leave Spanish Market around 1980, because his nontraditional work did not follow the Society’s guidelines. This helped spur him to join other local artists in creating their own sales venues, to circumvent the art-world categories that prevented galleries and museums from showing their work.
“That’s something we still contend with today,” says Padilla, “in terms of young Hispanos trying to come to terms with who they are and how they fit in with the cultural mix of New Mexico.” This region’s Hispanics, says Gandert, live a reality that still hasn’t been fully accepted. “This is a place of confluence,” he says. “So most of the things I photograph are these confluence points—where Hispanic and Native American communities come together.”
As a curator, Redding believes it was important to give non-Anglo photographers the opportunity to comment on the commodification of Hispanic and Native American art and culture. “If you’re an outsider looking in, no matter what community it is, you have a different perspective from someone in that community.” For decades, Native American artists were romanticized more than Hispanic artists, but according to Redding, that has changed. “If you look at Spanish Market and Indian Market, the crowds are the same for both,” she says.
Gandert isn’t so sure much has changed, although he acknowledges that the Santa Fe art community has embraced and supported his work, as well as that of fellow native New Mexican photographer Delilah Montoya. (Both are represented in town by Andrew Smith Gallery, and together have more than 30 pieces in the New Mexico Museum of Art’s permanent collection.) “There’s a lot that still needs to be done,” he says, “such as encouraging young Hispanics to go into the arts. It’s tough when you don’t have role models, like when the state university doesn’t have many Hispanic professors.” Padilla thinks that now it is time to acknowledge “this objectification of people and patronizing singular viewpoints, but also the wealth of innovation and creativity that exists today.” Photographs, Gandert suggests, play a powerful role in this. “Instead of accentuating the differences,” he says, “it’s about giving voice to the voiceless, and telling the story of the sameness.”
