su libro

Picture this Two photographic views of New Mexico, small kitchens, and the ultimate
low-desert yard make good summer reading (and viewing).
By Charles C. Poling

This article first appeared in Summer 05 Su Casa

Shelter from the Storm, The Photographs of Kirk Gittings, by Gussie Fauntleroy, foreword by V.B. Price, New Mexico Magazine, Santa Fe, NM, 88 pages plus four-page caption insert, 77 images, hardcover, $29.95.

Quoted in Shelter from the Storm by author Gussie Fauntleroy, photographer Kirk Gittings says, “There’s an implied hope in aesthetic beauty.” As the photos in this book emphatically demonstrate, Gittings is a surpassingly hopeful photographer who finds, creates, amplifies, and even invents beauty in a wide range of subjects. These include the ever-faithful ruins at Chaco Canyon, post-modern houses in Albuquerque, cast-off religious artifacts, churches, rail yards, a hymnal, and various built environments both public and private.

Gittings is one hard-working photographer. His images have graced every issue of Su Casa since I became editor nearly five years ago. For the past 25 years he’s been on the very short A-list of photographers who shoot for the leading New Mexico architects, builders, designers, and magazine editors. Any given day, odds are good that Gittings is standing behind his tripod-mounted view camera, open-top Starbucks cup in hand, waiting for a cloud to pass or counting seconds on an exposure of, say, the new Mini dealership, a tranquil adobe hacienda, or a crumbled Anasazi ruin. It’s all in a day’s work. Working a shoot with Gittings, though, I get the impression that he’s not so much on the job as expressing his being in its native mode: perceiving beauty.

Maybe that’s why Shelter from the Storm (Bob Dylan, anyone?) makes no distinction between images Gittings shot for hire and those he took for himself. Rather, they are all concerned with the interface between humanity and the world as mediated by, most often, a building or structure of some kind, inside or out. The shot selection makes no judgments: beauty speaks for itself. Distinctions between art and commercial work can seem precious and pompous against a book like this, which instead dares the reader/viewer to accept the images at face value. Draw your own conclusions.

Gittings selected and organized the photos in Shelter from the Storm to represent 30 years of a career yet far from finished. The photos express a compelling inevitability, as if objects, structure, light, and even cloudscapes arranged themselves for the camera. Yet none of the pictures feels manufactured or staged.

No wonder builders and architects love to have Gittings shoot their buildings: they acquire stature, impact, and a surprising emotional resonance through his lens. The great architectural photographers, and New Mexico is blessed with a handful, know how to shoot volume and void as well as mass, line, and color. Sometimes the subject of the photo, and of the architect’s design, is not so much the building as the space it defines. That’s where Gittings often finds potential and opportunity.

Some favorites: the brooding anachronistic majesty of Abiquiu morada, Westwork Architects’ post-industrial, post-pueblo residence, all the Chaco pictures, the amazingly eerie torn hymnal, the sinuous, upward stretching Disabled American Veterans Vietnam Memorial in Eagle Nest, and Cabezon Peak framed through a collapsed doorway of a Chaco outlier northwest of Rio Rancho.

Fauntleroy aptly keeps her written commentary to a minimum. Her elegant but never self-promoting prose stays out of the way and provides context by gently nudging the reader toward a perspective for viewing the images based on Gittings’ own words and anecdotes. The foreword by poet, author, and newspaper journalist V. B. Price, himself a long-time collaborator with Gittings, is a mini-masterwork of penetrating verbal economy. Let’s hope they collaborate again.

Shelter from the Storm belongs on your bookshelf because it conveys a mode of seeing New Mexico that responds deeply to the spirit of place, not just through landscape but through centuries of human interpretation of it. Here is a place that throws you back on yourself in stark introspection, if you let it. Shelter from the Storm helps you emerge from that encounter with fresh insight into the world and, just maybe, your place in it.

Ernest Knee in New Mexico, Photographs, 1930s–1940s, edited by Dana Knee, foreword by Robert A. Ewing, introduction by Catherine Williamson, Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, NM, 114 pages, 81 plates, hardcover, $39.95.

When Ernest Knee arrived in Santa Fe in May 1931, he later recalled, “I suddenly realized I loved the Southwest beyond anything else.” In the essay accompanying the photos in this book, Catherine Williamson suggests that Knee “made up his mind to stay, never regretting the life he chose.” She continues: “It is easy to imagine the initial attraction Ernie felt for Santa Fe: its sun-warmed, earth-hugging architecture; the landscape of dry hills and green mountains that turn pink, lavender, and gold in the changing light; the invigorating air tinged with scents of piñon pine and cedar; and the wide open sky with its billowing clouds. . . Santa Fe, and New Mexico in general, held a vision of something unaffected and pure. . . .”

Thus Knee is cast as a player in the culture-shaping myth of the artist in New Mexico, a motif of the larger American myth of the hero who delves into the landscape for transformation and rebirth. And though it may be hard to imagine a “pure and unaffected” spot anywhere on the planet nowadays, that myth continues to lure and capture painters, photographers, sculptors, and writers to this place, as well as real estate agents, computer programmers, dentists, home schoolers, you name it.

From the vantage of 2005, after umpteen makeovers of Santa Fe by Santa Fe in its own image, it’s laughably hard to imagine the self-proclaimed City Different as “unaffected and pure.” Especially not in the Thirties, well into the architectural transmogrification that turned Santa Fe into a lavishly articulated fantasy of a Dream Time New Mexico. But myths function because they state truths from the heart, where we shape meaning to fit the world. Few places have fabulated their own myth as successfully, as three dimensionally, and as enduringly as Santa Fe, which for much of the outside world is New Mexico. Certainly the place and the myth sells silver and turquoise jewelry, real estate, paintings, and magazines.

Ernest Knee in New Mexico, then, is both an homage to the Golden Age when this myth solidified, and a window onto the key, iconic imagery used to reference and invoke that myth today.

That Knee was not a photographer when he landed in Santa Fe is beside the point; in fact, it reinforces the narrative of transformation central to Santa Fe. As the story goes, he quickly learned the craft, hauling his 8x10 box camera everywhere: artists’ studios, pueblos, Santa Fe fiesta. While many of his early images are undistinguished and distractingly flawed technically, many others ring with a clarity of vision and unadorned observational insight. As anyone who has ever tried can tell you, it’s not always obvious how to shoot El Santuario de Chimayó, for instance, nor the sentinel mesas of Monument Valley. Sometimes, though, it is obvious, and given the low orbit of Santa Fe’s art-social circle, all those painters and photographers were tramping the same ground as often as not. Thus Knee’s view of the Rio Chama from Trujillo Hill above Abiquiu duplicates Georgia O’Keeffe’s painting of that spot, while his aspens photo falls far short of Ansel Adams’ startling (and now famous) rendition of those same trees or Eliot Porter’s amazing color study.

Some of the portraits of pueblo Indians are wincingly naïve and degrading in pose, while others are arrestingly immediate and unvarnished. That very inconsistency imbues Ernest Knee in New Mexico with considerable charm: it recalls a time before politically correct censorship emasculated aesthetics. Whether artists made good choices every time, at least they were honest ones.

Knee achieved a satisfying mix of compositional formality and grab-shot spontaneity, like the image of a bent old man leads two horses past Laguna Pueblo church in 1939. In another picture, three women apply fresh plaster to Taos Pueblo church. Viewed through the entry gate, one woman stepping half-way up a classic latilla ladder, these workers appear totally oblivious to Knee’s presence. He artfully composed the architectural elements of the picture, which is a study in symmetry against organized asymmetry. The people reinforce the message that this church belongs to a community, not the photographer, not the viewer.

In the early years of World War II, Knee sought to join the war effort. A debilitating childhood bout of rheumatic fever, then TB as a young man—the latter brought him to the Southwest—prevented his enlisting. He ended up as a documentary photographer for the Hughes Aircraft Company in Los Angeles, shooting planes and the like by day and starlets at Howard Hughes’ place by night. Santa Fe eventually called him back, a divorced and remarried man. Almost by chance he fell backward into the wood carving business, founding Spanish Pueblo Doors and all but abandoning photography for two decades. Then he began printing and exhibiting old negatives and ultimately achieving a place in the canon of New Mexico photography.

Knee’s personal history thus turns out to be a cautionary tale: art is a tough way to make a living. In America, we deeply believe that we can move to a new place and transform ourselves into someone new. Rebirth in a pure land is the most beautiful version of that myth. How ironic that Knee’s pictures reinforce that myth while his career exemplified the persuasive mundane demands of earning a living in a town of faux authenticity.

Yard Full of Sun, the Story of a Gardener’s Obsession That Got a Little Out of Hand, by Scott Calhoun, Rio Nuevo Publishers, Tucson, AZ, 196 pages, 93 photos and illustrations, paperback, $22.95.

During this past wet and warm February in central New Mexico, as I was mowing the “lawn” of weeds around my house, the relatively mindless work afforded ample opportunity to ponder the multiple, layered ironies of maintaining any semblance of horticultural haven around the old homestead in the high desert. What with the non-freezing nights—strange for February at 5,000 feet—and the at-least temporarily drought-breaking midwinter precip, our little half-acre was pushing up a bumper crop of yellow-flowered mustard weed and opportunistic Kentucky bluegrass.

Ten years ago, I’d vowed to never mow a lawn again, yet here I was, wasting good skier-Saturdays pushing a mower through dense jungles of unconquerable weeds and a fair-weather grass that won’t survive through June heat.

Ironic, then, that what grows is unwanted, that invasive lawn grass only flourishes in the winter when it’s not needed and dies when it is, that native water-conserving plants mostly time their growth cycles for summer monsoons and disbelieve this winter moisture, and so on. Ironic, maddening, shared by all of us, and sympathetically explored by author Scott Calhoun in Yard Full of Sun. Here’s a guy who looked at bare-dirt desert, the curse of new housing subdivisions, and saw a Sonoran garden writ small across his yard.

Positioned somewhere between Under the Tuscan Sun and the Plants of the Southwest catalog, this book blends anecdote, information, and xeriscape polemic into an entertaining, readable concoction. Though it’s about Arizona, it applies to any desert environment—a homeowner in Las Cruces or Midland or Las Vegas or Denver or Albuquerque can sort through the appendix charts of desert plants, bibliography, and retail resources (organized by Southwestern state) to glean what’s appropriate to her native environs.

Calhoun organizes Yard Full of Sun around his own experience designing the yard and garden of his one-eighth acre lot, where he worked with a crew to build a 1,400-square-foot, two-bedroom adobe house loaded with solar and green features, including extensive water harvesting. Whether he is selecting cactus, varieties of prickly pear, or a climbing vine for the ramada, Calhoun thinks out loud, sharing his selection criteria and extensive knowledge of the plants.

Calhoun writes feelingly about neighborhood natural history, whether it’s the bobcat that slips into his commercial nursery for an overnight stay, the coyotes outside the backyard, the zinnias he grabbed in a guerilla raid on the Golf Links Library, or his abortive attempt to fend off hungry javelinas from his property—all in good fun.

Calhoun finds the joy of desert gardening in the process, not the product. The process he advocates draws the gardener into a symbiotic relationship with the wider world beyond the garden walls, beyond the subdivision, beyond the bounds of civilization.

“The desert is a mindset,” Calhoun writes. Through the work of selecting and husbanding native plants, one is drawn into an appreciation of the local slice of biosphere that borders on reverence. Rather than denying that we live in the desert and banishing it to the urban fringe beyond our bluegrass lawns, Calhoun suggests we invite it in to stay.

Small Spaces, Beautiful Kitchens, by Tara McLellan, Quarry Books, Gloucester, MA, 144 pages, 120 images, paperback, $19.99.

When you’re staring down a kitchen remodel project, you need ideas, lots of ideas, from as wide and unpredictable a range of examples as possible. Nothing is too offbeat, bizarre, or gaudy, because it might just work in your place.

Tara McLellan’s Small Spaces, Beautiful Kitchens is one resource you’ll need (among many, no doubt), particularly if you’re puzzling over how to extract more usable space and functionality from a cramped kitchen’s existing footprint. Like my house.

You might be tempted to buy this book for the pictures. You’ll poach a dozen ideas, guaranteed. They show a tremendous range of ways to organize space, flow, storage, and all the yuppie como se llamas and appliances that define the 21st century kitchen. And because McLellan emphasizes small spaces, they all look attainable, affordable, or even doable in some combination of weekend DIY sufferfests and budget-smart outsourcing.

But Small Spaces, Beautiful Kitchens is more than pictures. McLellan calls it a “workbook, a plan book, an idea book” with the intention of helping the reader craft a manageable work plan to transform her own kitchen. To that end, Small Spaces, Beautiful Kitchens is organized into chapters on storage, decorating (meaning “interior design and architecture”), and a catch-all section on personalizing your space.

Shoot, there’s even a list of must-have pantry basics, items from aluminum foil to yeast. Your own personal caterer couldn’t care more about your kitchen.

If you’re looking for Southwest style ideas, stick to Su Casa and regional design books, but buy this Small Spaces, Beautiful Kitchens anyway. You’ll use it. As a portfolio of kitchen configurations that would work within any style regime, it is a worthy resource.