Photography Art Galleries

Photography in the Southwest: A Century of Seeing

The American Southwest has shaped the history of photography as profoundly as photography has shaped how we see the Southwest. The relationship begins in the 1860s and 1870s when the first survey photographers, Timothy O'Sullivan, William Bell, and Jack Hillers among them, accompanied government expeditions into the Colorado Plateau and the Great Basin, bringing back images of a landscape so alien to Eastern eyes that their photographs seemed barely credible. These early images established a documentary tradition, photography as a means of bearing witness to a world otherwise inaccessible, that runs through everything that has happened in Southwest photography since.

Ansel Adams is the figure most associated with Southwest photography in the popular imagination, and his images of Canyon de Chelly, the Navajo Nation lands, and New Mexico's Sangre de Cristo Mountains remain among the most recognized photographs ever made. Less well remembered is that Adams's friend and contemporary Laura Gilpin was making equally significant work at the same time, her portraits of Diné life and her landscape studies representing a more intimate and sustained engagement with the human dimension of the Southwest than Adams's work typically offered. Adams and Gilpin together defined the terms of serious Southwest photography for a generation.

The generation that followed pushed against those terms. Photographers working in the 1970s and 1980s began questioning the idealized, depopulated landscape photography of the Adams tradition, insisting on the human presence in the land, the towns, the highways, the mobile homes, the industry and the poverty alongside the grandeur. Joel Sternfeld's roadside photographs, Mark Klett's systematic revisiting of survey photography sites to show what had changed, Richard Misrach's devastating images of the Nevada Test Site: all challenged the idea that the Southwest landscape was pristine, timeless, or innocent of human damage.

Today the photography galleries of the Southwest show a full range of practice from landscape to documentary to conceptual and lens-based art that uses the camera as one tool among many. The Monroe Gallery of Photography in Santa Fe is among the finest dedicated photography galleries in the country, representing historic masters alongside contemporary artists. The Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego's Balboa Park has a distinguished program. Many galleries that show painting and sculpture also maintain strong photography programs, reflecting the medium's complete integration into the fine art market. Editions and prints on paper make photography one of the most accessible points of entry for new collectors, with significant work often available in the $500-$5,000 range.