Photography
Gilpin said she made her earliest dated autochome in 1908 when she was 17 years old. Since this process had only become widely available the year, she showed remarkable interest in photography for a teenage girl at that time. When she decided she wanted to seriously study photography, Käsebier advised her to go to at the Clarence White School in New York City. She moved there from 1916–1918 and learned the techniques and craft of her trade. She deeply admired White, whom she later called "one of the greatest teachers I have ever known in any field". Her early work was in the Pictorialist style, but by the 1930s she had moved away from the soft-focus look of that style. She found her true vision in the peoples and landscapes of the American Southwest, and she published several books on the region. Like her mentor Käsebier she made her living taking portraits, but in the mid-1930s she began to receive critical acclaim for her photographs of the Navajo and Pueblo peoples and for her landscapes. By the end of that decade she was exhibiting photos in shows throughout the United States and in Europe.
She went to become one of the great masters of the art of platinum printing, and many of her platinum prints are now in museums around the world. She said "I have always loved the platinum printing process. It's the most beautiful image one can get. It has the longest scale and one can get the greatest degree of contrast. It's not a difficult process; it just takes time."
Over a thirty-year period from 1945-1975 her work was seen in more than one hundred one-person and group exhibits.
In 1974 the governor of New Mexico awarded her one of the first Annual Awards for Excellence in the Arts. She continued to be very active as a photographer and as a participant in the Santa Fe arts scene until her death in 1979.
Gilpin's photographic and literary archives are now housed at the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.
Read more about this topic: Laura Gilpin
Famous quotes containing the word photography:
“If photography is allowed to stand in for art in some of its functions it will soon supplant or corrupt it completely thanks to the natural support it will find in the stupidity of the multitude. It must return to its real task, which is to be the servant of the sciences and the arts, but the very humble servant, like printing and shorthand which have neither created nor supplanted literature.”
—Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867)
“Too many photographers try too hard. They try to lift photography into the realm of Art, because they have an inferiority complex about their Craft. You and I would see more interesting photography if they would stop worrying, and instead, apply horse-sense to the problem of recording the look and feel of their own era.”
—Jessie Tarbox Beals (1870–1942)