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    Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico Portrait
    Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico Portrait
    Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico Portrait
    Ebook184 pages

    Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico Portrait

    By Craig Varjabedian

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    About this ebook

    This collection of elegantly composed black-and-white images by one of New Mexico’s most accomplished photographers, celebrates the state’s captivating physical variety and enduring allure. With subject matter ranging from some of the state’s most iconic landforms—including the White Sands desert and Carlsbad Caverns—to the people who work the land, Varjabedian’s images pay homage to New Mexico’s ancient history and to the homely details of everyday life. In photographing his subjects, whether epic or mundane, Varjabedian seeks the moments when the light, shadow, composition, and other elements combine to express the beauty of the place.

    Marin Sardy’s wide-ranging essay provides historical and cultural contexts in which to understand Varjabedian’s work. Scholar-poet Jeanetta Calhoun Mish defines the particular quality of the artist’s imagery.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherUniversity of New Mexico Press
    Release dateOct 1, 2012
    ISBN9780826348814
    Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico Portrait
    Author

    Craig Varjabedian

    Craig Varjabedian is a renowned photographer and author. His most recent UNM Press book, Landscape Dreams: A New Mexico Portrait, won the prestigious New Mexico–Arizona Book Award. Based in Santa Fe, he photographs throughout the American West and teaches at Eloquent Light Photography Workshops.

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      Book preview

      Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico Portrait - Craig Varjabedian

      A Particular Kind of Dream

      Marin Sardy

      Enchantment

      Well—there is the empty desert; there are the arid mountains; they shimmer in the ashen heart of noon, or swim in the far elusive corners of evening—a reality that appears unreal, challenging the imagination.… You cannot argue with the silence. It returns your questionings to you, to your own inner silence which becomes aware.

      —Maynard Dixon, Letter to Millard Sheets

      I begin with one word: enchantment. Outside, sunlight flashes on cottonwood seedpods that wiggle in the January wind. Each branch casts quaking shadows on the textured adobe walls, conveying a familiar overtone of subtly shifting calm. There’s often a caprice in the way things move in New Mexico—an unpredictability, a here-and-then-gone feeling that carries in it a sense of possibility. And beyond that, there’s something of the ungraspable in what enchantment means, something uncanny—like witchcraft or miracles. It jolts, like the foot-wide band of lightning that strikes the tree across the street while you stand watching from your kitchen. It lulls, like the candlelight flickering on a Madonna in a dim chapel. It lingers, like the ghost story of the gambler shot dead in a Cimarron hotel room. It’s where you expect to find it (a double rainbow) and where you don’t (an April blizzard, or a herd of pronghorn racing across the plain).

      How has enchantment—and the handle Land of Enchantment—become synonymous with no place other than New Mexico? Few states boast origins as diverse. Distinct for its complex geography and history, New Mexico was inhabited for millennia by Native Americans before becoming part of the Viceroyalty of New Spain, then the republic of Mexico, and finally the United States. New Mexico’s statehood centennial in 2012, celebrating its admittance to the Union as the forty-seventh state, comes almost five hundred years after Coronado first officially explored the region for the Spanish Crown.

      Where East Meets West, Municipal Airport, Albuquerque, N.M., 1941. Genuine Curteich-Chicago Post Card.

      The state’s culture and economy have always been deeply tied to its landscape, a continental crossroads. New Mexico’s leading industries, energy production and tourism, still reflect these ties. So do its communities: New Mexico claims among the highest statewide proportions of both Hispanic residents (45 percent) and Native American residents (10 percent) in many centuries-old neighborhoods, villages, and twenty-two federally recognized pueblos and tribal districts.

      In a sense it seems odd that such a state’s mysterious power could be summed up in a single word, enchantment. But maybe that’s the paradox of places like New Mexico, places that can be defined at least in part by their diversity. With a total area of about 121,000 square miles, but few cities and a population of only two million, the state remains the sixth most sparsely inhabited. Yet in addition to its historic cultural centers—Albuquerque, the largest city, and Santa Fe, the state capital and one of the oldest cities on the continent—New Mexico claims one national park, two national historical parks, ten national monuments, two national laboratories, one Air Force missile range, and the site of the world’s first atomic blast. From its own internal contradictions, the place can’t help but take forms that might seem impossible.

      What must dwell in the minds of a race living in this land of enchantment? wrote Western-genre writer Zane Grey in his 1925 novel The Vanishing American (actually set near the Arizona-Utah state line). It was with similar grandiosity that the phrase had originally been coined in 1906, in Lilian Whiting’s book Land of Enchantment: From Pike’s Peak to the Pacific. Both, however, used the term in loose reference to the entire Southwest. How the phrase came to specifically signify New Mexico says as much about the state’s distinct power as any aspect of its history. New Mexico first claimed the phrase in 1935, when the newly formed state tourism bureau adopted Land of Enchantment from a Highway Department brochure touting New Mexico as a place that has lured men from afar off since the days of Coronado. Although the state remained officially on the books as The Sunshine State, the new term quickly caught on as the state’s unofficial moniker and was in heavy circulation by 1941, when it first appeared on a New Mexico license plate. By 1999, when Governor Bill Richardson signed legislation designating Land of Enchantment as the state’s official nickname, it had been overused for so long that you’d think it would have been reduced, by its own ubiquity, to near

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