Eagle Dancers #1 (1962). Lee Marmon’s Laguna Pueblo embraced the modern world, but dance remained among the most sacred and widely respected of the Pueblo’s traditional rituals.

46 | MAY 2015 LEE MARMON AN EYE FOR CHANGE

It’s hard to keep a straight face learn- he’s sold thousands of copies on T-shirts, posters, and prints. Since then, the quarter-Laguna “blue-eyed Indian” has been ing that 89-year-old photographer Lee very much in the public view. He spent some time in southern Marmon wished he’d done more to California shooting golf tournaments and celebs, took pictures capture the old people and the old ways for the Nixons, and saw his work celebrated by the Smithson- at Laguna and Acoma Pueblos. This is, ian, London’s Barbican, and the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, which presented him with a Lifetime Achieve- after all, the man who recently sold his ment Award in 2006. He also published a steady stream of work collection of up to 100,000 negatives to in Time magazine and . the . And now But it’s the Laguna photos Marmon took in the three decades after his return from Alaska that populate this book. They with his new book, Laguna Pueblo: A capture a disappearing world, one busily adjusting to modern Photographic History (University of New influences—as Sousea’s choice of footwear suggests. Not, as Cor- Mexico Press, 2015), co-authored with bett notes, that change was anything new to Laguna. The Pueblo longtime friend Tom Corbett, Marmon embraced the railroad in the 1880s, setting up a hotel and orga- nizing shopping trips; the highways in the fifties, with gas stations offers further evidence of his prolific and trading posts; and then the nuclear age, with the Jackpile career documenting Pueblo life. mine, which brought money, jobs, and plenty of outsiders. Marmon’s first photograph, snapped when he was 11, was of a With change, particularly rapid change, the past can fall by truck accident on old Route 66. The truck’s insurance company the wayside. “It is our hope,” Corbett said, “that these images and paid him for it, and he had a new hobby. But it wasn’t until he got the stories around them will help the young people remember back from service in the Aleutian Islands in 1947 that the hobby their ancestors, give them direction and a way to perpetuate the turned into something altogether different. His father bought him Laguna culture in the future. This is the story I first wanted to a fancy camera and pointed out that it would be nice to have tell years ago, and it’s the culmination of Lee’s work, and further something to remember the old folks by. And so, as Lee motored evidence, I think, that he is the Edward S. Curtis or William around in his Model A truck delivering groceries from the family Henry Jackson of our age.” trading post, he started asking those old folks to pose for a picture. The five photographs reproduced here, from among the hun- What had been a personal passion caught the public atten- dred or so in the book, each tell a story of Laguna that, unlike the tion in 1955 with White Man’s Moccasins, a photograph of work of early Anglo photographers, is from the singular perspec- Laguna elder Jeff Sousea wearing a pair of Keds. Marmon says tive of an insider. —Peter BG Shoemaker

nmmagazine.com | MAY 2015 47 Blue Corn (1949). Modernization brought hydropower. As rivers were dammed, Laguna agriculture declined. Blue corn, however, remains one of the most valued crops in New Mexico.

48 NEW MEXICO | MAY 2015 Benny with Horse at Sheep Camp (1984). In one of his favorite pictures, Marmon portrayed sheepherder Benny Pacheco a year before he died.

nmmagazine.com | MAY 2015 49 Governor Solomon with Photos (1958). Since the late 1600s, military service has been an important component of Laguna identity, and in this portrait Solomon proudly displays pictures of his sons.

Rosita Johnson (1958). Born in 1876, Johnson got her start as a potter, like many in Laguna, selling her wares to train passengers stopping to visit Acoma or on their way to Santa Fe. She became well known and was still working in her eighties when Marmon took this picture.

50 NEW MEXICO | MAY 2015 nmmagazine.com | MAY 2015 51