Laura Gilpin: An Enduring Grace

Fort Worth, Texas: Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, 1986. Assumed First Edition . Hard Back. Very Good/Very Good. 10" x 12 3/4. 339 Pages Indexed. Dust jacket has some light wear around the edges and a couple of tape repairs. Laura Gilpin: An Enduring Grace by Martha A. Sandweiss is the first book devoted to the life and work of one of America's fmest photographers. Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) photographed the American Southwest for more than sixty years, creating an extraordinary document of the land and its people. She is best known for her photographs of the Pueblo and Navajo Indians that constitute a major contribution to the documentation of Southwestern Indian life, bridging the gap between the studied sentimentality of earlier Indian photography and the objective documentation of later work. Gilpin's photographic career began at the Clarence H. White School in New York in 1916 and continued when she returned home to Colorado Springs in 1918 to begin a professional career. She quickly earned national and international recognition for her photographs, which increasingly focused on regional subjects. Through four major books, The Pueblos: A Camera Chronicle (1941), Temples in Yucatan: A Camera Chronicle of Chichen Itza (1948), The Rio Grande: River of Destiny (1949), and The Enduring Navaho (1968), she established herself as an important commentator on the cultural geography of her native Southwest. A contemporary of Mary Austin and Willa Cather, Gilpin was unique among the women chroniclers of the Southwest because she chose pho-tography as her medium of expression. As one of the few significant women landscape photographers, she created a visual record of the Southwest that emphasizes the historical influence of the landscape on human development. A large heavy book that will incur additional shipping charges to most locations.