Chris Wilson, chairman of cultural landscape studies at UNM, is the closing speaker at “Through the Lens,” an exhibit at the New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe. Wilson will speak Oct. 23 at 6 p.m. in the museum’s auditorium. At the event, which is free to the public, Wilson will discuss the museum’s photo collections and Santa Fe’s regional identity.
Daily Lobo: What is the exhibit “Through the Lens” about?
Chris Wilson: This is an exhibit that has been up at the Palace of the Governors History Museum in Santa Fe for a year now, and it is a major retrospective show about photography in and around Santa Fe. … And the museum itself has a major photo archive, one of the best in the country and certainly one of the best state archives. This is a sampling of their photo collections, which expands to possibly more than 500,000 photos. And it’s letting people see the range of photos that they have collected. It shows the growth of Santa Fe as a tourist region and its transformation through the years.
DL: What will your concluding talk consist of?
CW: The title of my talk is, “The Exalting Eye: Photography and the Myth of Santa Fe,” and it’s playing off a book that I wrote and published about 10 years ago called The Myth of Santa Fe: Creating a Modern Regional Tradition, and that book is about how Santa Fe reinvented itself in 1912 as the regional center of arts and culture as we know it today and the role photography played in its reinvention … When the railroad bypassed Santa Fe, there was a serious economic decline, and as New Mexico was campaigning for statehood, a portion of the city Americanized itself in order to appeal to the East Coast by conforming itself to the building styles present elsewhere — not in the regional Spanish-Pueblo style. The city had its official image, and then there were photographers that were catering to the tourist industry, and they were showing the Old World New Mexico style. Once statehood was granted, the region felt like they had lost their identity and wished to go back to the style that they were accustomed to. I will also be talking about the way that photography is pivotal by first developing the split identity, then resolving it to the romantic images we see today.
DL: How has the image of Santa Fe and New Mexico changed throughout the years since the reinvention?
CW: Once it was formulated, it stayed pretty consistent — the mission churches, the Spanish houses and the desert landscape — and occasionally we do see something added — the pitched metal roofs, the stucco houses — which have only recently entered the tourist imagery.
DL: Are there artists who are showing ideals different from the tourist views?
CW: There are artists that are not catering to the tourist imagery market, but instead they are commenting on it and they are questioning it, and oftentimes they use the tourist images but they tweak them, using a tongue-in-cheek method or twisting them entirely. Or in some cases, they are including and drawing attention to some of the aspects of New Mexican culture that are sometimes overlooked. The tourist image emphasizes the Pueblo culture much more than the contemporary Hispanic culture; they look at conquistadorian ideals, but they don’t focus on the lowriders and the cholos present today. These artists are respectfully portraying them. For instance, some have them look to the camera instead of the Pueblo ideal of having them look away to the distance, and by having them look to the camera it is not romanticized — it’s much more realistic.
