Early Work

Navajo Family with Flag

Navajo Family with Flag

Medium: Gelatin silver photograph
Date: 1950
Size: 13x10"

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Luke Yazzie

Luke Yazzie

Medium: Gelatin silver photograph
Date: 1952
Size: 8x10"

Luke Yazzie is photographed in profile at Pine Springs, a small community southwest of the Navajo Nation capital of Window Rock, in 1952. “Good manners and simple courtesy are very much a part of Navaho life,” Gilpin wrote, “and there is always a right way and a wrong way to do everything. This is why Navaho People deliberate before every act, before every spoken word.”

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Navajo Family in Covered Wagon

Navajo Family in Covered Wagon

Medium: Gelatin silver photograph
Date: 1934 printed later
Size: 13 1/4x10 3/4"

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BIOGRAPHY

Born in Colorado, Laura Gilpin attended a Connecticut preparatory school to study music and later the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York. Study with White led her to initially embrace a pictorialist style that emphasized beauty and artistic creation over photography’s documentary qualities.As photography advanced in the early decades of the 20th century, Gilpin turned away from the Pictorialist-inspired images and began taking “straight photographs.” In a field traditionally championed by men, Gilpin was one of the first women to capture the landscape of the West becoming widely known for her extended documentation of the Southwestern landscape and the Dinéh (Navajo) people.

My encounter with Laura Gilpin

Early in my career as a gallerist, I had the privilege of visiting Laura Gilpin at her home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. My sole purpose for the visit was straightforward: I wanted to purchase her work.

Upon arriving, Laura welcomed me and my family with incredible warmth and hospitality. Her home, like her photographs, seemed to exude an aura of both quiet strength and delicate beauty. As we settled in, she graciously asked me to bring in “my work” to show her. She suggested, with a twinkle in her eye, that perhaps we could trade—she would offer me one of her photographs in exchange for a piece of mine.

Without hesitation, I explained that I wasn’t a photographer myself. I was, in fact, there only to buy her work. Laura’s response was warm and understanding, but the gesture, even in its unexpectedness, remains one of the most memorable moments of my early career. It was a reminder that the art world, even in its transactions, could still be personal, generous, and full of surprises.