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Elevated Perespectives.Pdf E levated perspectives the ultimate time-lapse photography project By Maxine McBrinn 50 El Palacio NE LATE JANUARY MORNING, I WAS research. They were originally stored at the institution’s treated to an aerial overview of the greater headquarters and sometime later were sent to the Labora- Santa Fe region, flying with pilot-photogra- tory of Anthropology. Before 1929 and on through the 1940s, pher Adriel Heisey. His work is featured in Kidder was associated with both the Carnegie Institution and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture’s the Lab. He served on the Lab’s board and often advised its Oexhibition Oblique Views: Archaeology, Photography, and Time administrators and researchers on a variety of topics. At some alongside images of the northern Southwest and Rio Grande point, Kidder or someone else at the Carnegie Institution created by Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh in 1929. must have decided that the Lindberghs’ aerial photos would It was a lovely morning, bright and breezy, the latest snow be most useful in Santa Fe, then as now a center for south- gone from all but the most shadowed spots. As we flew over western archaeology. the Sangre de Cristo mountain range toward Pecos National The Lindberghs’ aerial photographs offer a rare look at the Monument and the archaeological site of Pecos Pueblo, I found condition of the sites, towns, villages, and pueblos as well myself having trouble identifying exactly where we were. as the landscape around them. Not surprisingly, things have Many of my usual, ground-based landscape markers were changed since 1929. Some of the sites have been excavated, distorted by the height and were faded against a country of backfilled, stabilized, or left as is during the intervening new geography. The land looked different, both less familiar years. Towns, villages, and pueblos have grown or, if they and more detailed. I was lost among the unknown features haven’t, the land they sit on and the landscapes they inhabit that filled my field of vision, but the view also opened a fresh are being used in different ways. These changes are the way to see what had been ordinary. This new perspective on results of decisions made by people over the course of eighty- well-known places is a great benefit of aerial photographs and odd years admixed with changing environments, changing is one of the aspects explored by this exhibition. priorities, and changing traditions. The Lindbergh photo- The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of graphs hint at all of this: the passage of time and the altera- Anthropology and the larger entity of the Museum of New tions it has brought. Mexico include many treasures in their collections. Among Oblique Views is about those changes. We were fortunate those treasures are aerial photographs of southwestern archae- to have Adriel Heisey, a gifted aerial photographer with years ological sites and living communities taken by the Lindberghs of experience photographing archaeological sites and land- in 1929. Most of the Laboratory Archives’ images, including scapes, rephotograph a number of the Lindbergh images. For the Lindbergh negatives, were sent to the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives in the 1970s, during an effort to collect and preserve photos White House Ruin, Canyon de Chelly and negatives from all the Museum of New PLATE 11 Opposite, top: Photograph by Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Mexico divisions in one central location. The 1929. White House Ruin is composed of two parts: a larger room block on the canyon floor Lab, however, retained the prints. that rose to four stories high in the back, and another set of rooms built in a rock shelter The Lindberghs took these photographs at immediately above. The upper rooms could have been reached from the fourth-story roof of the request of Alfred Vincent Kidder, a highly the lower structure. The bulging, stained walls of the rock face near the rock shelter have made respected archaeologist and a leading voice in the site a favorite photographic subject. Timothy O’Sullivan photographed the site in the mid- Southwest archaeology during the field’s devel- 1870s, and it has been well photographed ever since, including by Ansel Adams. opment. Notations made by Charles Lindbergh and Kidder on the backs of the original photo- PLATE 12 Opposite, bottom: Photograph by Adriel Heisey, 2008. White House graphic prints show that both men looked at Ruin is harder to see now because of the additional vegetation. This is the only site in Canyon them, in some cases together; in others, Kidder de Chelly that is accessible without a guide, and is by far the most visited ruin in the canyon. responded to Lindbergh’s notes. A hiking trail leads to the site from a parking lot on the rim above. A pedestrian bridge over the The Lindberghs gave the prints and negatives wash can be seen, as can the hiking trail. Tour trucks and jeeps park at the ruin-end of the bridge, to Kidder and the Carnegie Institution of Wash- although they ford the wash rather than crossing the bridge. Even outside the wash, plant growth ington, DC, which sponsored much of Kidder’s is lusher today, in part because the site is not being grazed as intensively as it was in 1929. El Palacio 51 each image, he matched the original perspective and for many but not all the original time of year and time of day. These contemporary photographs high- light and clarify the passage of time in the years after the Lindberghs took their images and allow the viewer to contem- plate how and why these landscapes have changed. archaeology and the west on film PHOTOGRAPHY HAS BEEN part of American western exploration and settlement for almost 150 years. Initially, to those of European descent, the West was seen as exotic, myste- rious, and romantically wild. Govern- ment funders, scientists, and the general public in the East were eager for glimpses of western wonders. Many government-backed exploring parties took artists and photographers to document their findings. Some early landscape photographers who were later acknowledged as great artists got their start this way, including Timothy O’Sullivan, William Henry Jackson, William Bell, and John K. Hillers. In the early days of photography, Pueblo del Arroyo, Chaco Canyon photographs were seen as lasting, PLATE 17 Photograph by Charles A. and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, 1929. Pueblo del Arroyo tangible pieces of evidence. The clarity lies immediately next to Chaco Wash, and its location inspired its name. When the Lindberghs photographed of detail and the lack of any obvious the site, the circular tri-walled structure on the western extension of the pueblo was being eroded by the artistic license in a photograph stood in wash. Neil Judd excavated a large part of the pueblo in the late 1920s, resulting in the empty rooms visible contrast to the artistic decisions made in both photos. The more modern buildings to the southeast of the ancient pueblo were built by Richard in the creation of a painting or drawing. Wetherill in 1899 and served as a boarding house for archaeologists and other visitors. They were converted Photographs seemed to capture reality into the Chaco Canyon Trading Post in the 1930s. The road to Gallup crossed the wash nearby. and convey truth. Later, of course, as photography became more common, viewers began to understand that God’s recording angel.” Instead, each photograph reflects the photographers, like other artists, can manipulate the factors choices and skill of its creator. under their control to create the results they want. A photo- Regardless of the truth of the image, because of the graph is not, as Oliver Wendell Holmes once put it while extol- extraordinary detail that can be shown in a photograph, ling the wonders of photography, “a leaf torn from the book of each image can be thought of as capturing an instant of time: 52 El Palacio the quality of light, the weather condi- tions, the state of vegetation, and animal or human activity. This trick of freezing time is part of what makes even recent photos feel nostalgic. Old photographs, however, especially those from the more distant past, depict a time beyond our personal experience, a time whose stories are known only through books or from the remembrances of old colleagues or family members, sometimes retelling stories they were told long ago. Historical photos can feel discon- nected from the lives we lead; we can’t feel nostalgia, for it’s a time we never knew. When we look at photos taken long ago, it is not usually the landforms that inform us of the passage of time but those things that we know are short-lived: clothing or hairstyles, architecture, or the style of automobiles. In some pictures, when we look carefully, the land itself shows changes, sometimes so dramatic that we can no longer see the link to the past. More usually, though, the geographical details trace a likeness to its appearance today.. aerial literacy AFTER OUR VISIT to Pecos, Heisey and I flew over the Galisteo Basin, south of Santa Fe, an area that was heavily popu- lated from the 1200s CE until after the Spanish arrived. As we looked down on the vast basin, with its Pueblo del Arroyo, Chaco Canyon ancient sites and contemporary inhabitants, Heisey mentioned how, over time, he had learned to see layers of the past on the PLATE 18 Photograph by Adriel Heisey, 2008. In the years since landscape. The present is seen in the houses, roads, cars, irri- the Lindberghs took their photograph of Pueblo del Arroyo, Chaco Wash has gation systems, and fields now in use.
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