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New Mexicoby Philip Greenspun |
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New Mexico is more quietly beautiful than some Western states. It isn't
"one National Park after another" like Utah or California. It doesn't
have one spectacular spot like Yellowstone. You might have to
spend an entire year in this vast state to hit your photographic
stride. But if you do hit that stride, you'll be in good company with
the artists and photographers who've been attracted to the light for
over a century.
There are awe-inspiring Anasazi houses dating from 1200 A.D. or so. The
most famous of these are in Mesa Verde National Park, just over the
border into Colorado from northwest New Mexico. For photography, I
personally think that Chaco Culture National Historic Park is the most
interesting ancient spot. It is also possible to photograph at current
occupied pueblos in Taos and Acoma.
As far as Spanish adobe churches, the most famous is in Ranchos de Taos,
90 minutes north of Santa Fe. The back of this church has been done by
every major Western photographer. The entire area from Santa Fe to Taos
is rich with interesting churches.
I really can't say that I've taken too many good photos of any New Mexican thing built by Anglos. There are a lot of huge adobe hotels and such in Santa Fe that are impressive for scale. Los Alamos National Lab is important historically. But I didn't spend enough time in the state to find good Anglo subjects.
Chaco was the center of a trading society with an extensive road network and far-flung settlements. There are all kinds of impressive ruins, notably Pueblo Bonito, which once contained 600 rooms and 75 kivas.
... there are some interesting places to visit, not least of which is
Aztec Ruins National Monument. This area was built up by people from
Chaco around 1100 A.D. and then occupied by people from Mesa Verde
around 1200 A.D. There is a ruined pueblo the size of a football field
and a reconstructed Great Kiva.
Strictly speaking, Mesa Verde is not in New Mexico but rather just over
the NW border into Colorado. However, it is spiritually and physically
quite close to Chaco and deserves to be included in any tour of New
Mexico.
Here's what I wrote to my brother back in 1994:
I'm very glad I got to Mesa Verde last weekend. The Park Service is
going to close all the ruins to tours in a couple of years, according
to one ranger. One could see why. They've instituted a ticket system
for Cliff Palance and Balcony House, two of the the largest ruins.
The (free) tix sold out at 11:30 and 1 on Saturday so I went only to
Balcony House on Sunday (there is plenty more to see in the park).
About 50 people went on the tour and there was really no way for them
to all stay off the ruin walls. A really interesting anthropologist
gave the tour and explained the Anasazi movement from pit houses on
the mesa top (600 AD) to above-ground housing (1000 AD) to cliff
housing (1200 AD) in terms of better food preservation technology to
support a growing population. (They bugged out entirely in around
1300 to become the Hopi and the rest of the Pueblo Indians, presumably
in response to a drought, deforestation, and exhaustion of the local
resources.)
The most obvious photographic tip here is to plan your trip to include at least one sunset and at least one sunrise; the dunes aren't so interesting in the flat light of midday. There is a campground within the park and you'll be able to get plenty of rest because there isn't much nightlife inside Great Sand Dunes National Monument.
Try to avoid changing film out in the Dunes, especially if it is windy. Sand inside your camera will scratch the negatives and only hours and hours of painful work in PhotoShop will restore them. Sand can also get into lens focusing helicals so you might not want to take those $3,000 Hasselblad lenses out onto the Dunes if the wind is high.
[By the way, unless you are an expert skier, do not even think about skiing in Taos. It is one of the toughest mountains in the US and basically does not have beginner slopes. The nearby Angel Fire resort apparently caters to wimps to some extent, though I've never been there.]
Everyone wants to photograph the back of the church (which faces West). But I was there in March when it wasn't the right time of day for the light:
I returned in August and got better results:
Chimayo, along the beautiful high road to Taos from Santa Fe, is famous for its church.
Art, however, can be built out of anything, including Cheese Doodles:
One weekend in August, Santa Fe goes crazy with "Indian Market", where hundreds of Native American artists converge on the plaza to sell their wares. How expensive are some of these? Suffice it to say that all of the cash machines in town are empty by Sunday afternoon.
Wherever I am, I like to take photos of dogs.
It would also seem that, wherever I am, I managed to get a photo of a Gay Parade, though Santa Fe's isn't as big as New York's.
Fifteen miles southwest of Alamogordo ("home of the Big One"), White
Sands National Monument's pure gypsum sands are presumably beautiful at
sunrise. I wouldn't know because it was closed when I got there at 7
am, the official opening time. The military was testing missiles at the
nearby White Sands Missile Range. By the time the monument opened for tourists,
it was too late to get any decent photos. To distract you from the fact
that I couldn't stay an extra day to cover the 275 square miles of dunes
at sunset and sunrise, I'll throw in some random facts. Uh... actually
I can't think of any random facts. You drive in 8 miles. You drive
back out 8 miles. You get out of the car sometimes to walk around a bit
with your camera. You get back into the car.
Oh well, here are some of my photos (taken around 10 am) just to let you
know what White Sands looks like:
Deep in southern New Mexico, Carlsbad Caverns National Park is
impressively huge (one room is the size of 14 football fields). It is a
tough place to photograph artistically. Electronic flash will
ruin the mood. The National Park Service is against lurid light shows
and mostly has the interior lit with subdued lights in just a few hues.
Still, it is worth a walk-through with a tripod. There is a cafeteria
down at the bottom if you should get hungry.
If you're going down as far south as Carlsbad, you should consider visiting Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas and Juarez, Mexico (across the border from El Paso).
Officially in Socorro, the Very Large Array is actually 50 miles west on
a high deserted plateau. Countless movie crews have been attracted to
this spooky complex of huge parabolic antennae on railroad tracks.
There are 27 dishes, each 81 feet in diameter. They can be spread out
in a Y pattern 22 miles across. The basic idea is that the VLA can work
like an antenna that actually is 22 miles across. The larger
the antenna, the smaller angle over which it transmits or receives. So
the VLA dishes can be pulled in tight when radio astronomers want to
scan a broad area of the sky or spread out wide when investigating a
small region. Anyway, at this point I'm exhausting what I remember from
freshman physics at MIT, so you probably should check
the National Radio Astronomy Observatory
server for more info.
You might find this map helpful.
Text and photos copyright 1994-1997 Philip Greenspun