Desert of the (un)Real
Teasing Meaning from the New Mexico History Museum’s Photography Archives
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When archivist Daniel Kosharek began work at the Palace of the Governors photo archives in 2005, he walked into a situation as daunting as it was thrilling—down there in the basement of the New Mexico History Museum he discovered a labyrinthine world of cardboard boxes, filled and overflowing with photos, piled in stacks, tucked under tables, hidden behind desks. Most were unlabeled. Some of the photos were disintegrating. And the archives didn’t even own a computer.1
Originally founded by the New Mexico Historical Society in 1851, the collection currently boasts more than 840,000 works.2 But anyone other than the most dogged of researchers might find the place impossible to navigate.3 During the past four years, Kosharek, curator Mary Anne Redding (who joined the team in 2006), and a team of volunteers have made it their Sisyphean mission to make the visual history of New Mexico, and the history of photography in general, available to New Mexicans.4
Russell Lee’s portrait of Pie Town resident Mrs. George Hutton at her altar, commissioned by the Farm Security Administration
To accomplish that, the two, along with digital specialist Nicholas Chiarella and, finally, proper equipment, have begun organizing the massive collection according to the principles of modern library science. No more cardboard boxes: The crumbling negatives have been scanned and are now kept frozen in a special refrigerator, and all of the archives’ holdings have been logged into a database. “In the past it was a secret society,” admits Redding. “Nowadays, we want people to know we are here.”
Ironically, getting the word out about its vast trove of images harks back not only to one of the seminal moments in the history of both the archives and Santa Fe (in 1912), it also gets at the heart of that weird, alluring, loaded, contextually squishy intersection where photography, reality, fantasy, history, the west, and the American Dream all collide--again and again, it seems—and what comes out of that collision is a new mythology, one where the west becomes “the West,” Santa Fe “Santa Fe” (or, better, Fanta Sé)—a strange brew of the real and the magical, a place onto which America—and Americans—projects its fantasies and aspirations.
Fittingly, photography was being birthed5 right about the time the United States had perfected its concept of Manifest Destiny.6 Equally fitting, photography and Manifest Destiny served each other’s purposes: Photography showed the glorious, adventurous, potent possibilities of an American empire, and M.D. gave American photographers the resources to go out and shoot everything in sight—miners, Native Americans, the building of the railroad, the landscape. But, while both put into a frame (or into a box) whatever they came across (capturing an elusive moment in time, capturing an elusive race of people), photography caught its subjects artfully, romantically, powerfully, and often unforgettably. On occasion, it even did so truthfully as well.
1. One reason for such disarray: The archives was not formally managed as a museum collection until the 1960s; PoG didn’t get its first photo archivist until 1971; and only in 1974 did it finally designate someone, a Dr. Richard Rudisill, curator of photographic collections.
2. Housing one of the oldest collections of photographs in the western U.S., the archives’ holdings include original and copy negatives, daguerreotypes, tintypes, ambrotypes, more than 30,000 glass-plate negatives, stereographs, postcards, panoramas, lantern slides, and color transparencies documenting the history of the West, New Mexico, and Santa Fe, as well as historical pictures of Paris, the Philippines, Mexico, and other areas around the world.
3. Of those 800,000-plus images, maybe 10 percent have been cataloged; the other 700,000 or so remain unknown, unidentified, or otherwise waiting to be categorized.
4. Sisyphean because for every image they identify and catalog, as many as 100 new images arrive or await classification.
5. In 1849.
6. The mid-19th century idea that the U.S. was divinely ordained to expand across the North American continent.
