Through her work, she became acutely aware of
how the land was an environment that shaped
human activity.
Gilpin was born in Colorado Springs and she
began using a camera at age 12. Both her mother
and family friend photographer Gertrude Ka ̈sebier
supported her interest in photography. Educated
in eastern boarding schools, Gilpin asserted her
regional individuality by wearing a cowboy hat at
school. In 1916, she enrolled in the Clarence White
School in New York and mastered the Pictorialist
style favored by the school’s instructors.
A year later, she returned to Colorado and
opened a studio specializing in portraits and archi-
tectural buildings, and she began photographing
the landscapes around eastern Colorado. In 1924,
she photographed the Mesa Verde cliffs and ruins
and self-published the images as: Mesa Verde
National Park(1927), and a companion booklet,
The Pikes Peak Region(1926). Unlike many of her
contemporaries who during the Great Depression
found employment with government-sponsored
programs such as the FSA [see WPA], Gilpin
earned her living producing postcards, and a series
of lantern slides of archaeological subjects. Her
earnings were supplemented by a turkey farm
that she ran with her lifelong companion Elizabeth
Forster.
Shortly before World War II, her book on the
Rio Grande pueblos, The Pueblos: A Camera
Chronicle(1941), was published, after which she
left her work in the Southwest to take a job as a
photographer in the public relations department
of the Boeing Aircraft Company in Kansas. After
the war, she traveled to Yucata ́n in Mexico and
expanded her interest in the architectural heritage
of vanished indigenous peoples. The images of her
next book,Temples of Yucata ́n; A Camera Chroni-
cle of Chichen Itza(1948), are characterized by a
visually powerful explosion of light from a sun-
burst framed by a sentinel-like portion ofEl Cas-
tillo (The Castle). Her next book, Rio Grande:
River of Destiny (1949), was described as ‘‘a
human geographical study.’’ In her final book on
the Southwest,The Enduring Navajo(1968), Gilpin
sought to record and convey how the Navaho
were accommodating to change in the same way
they had accommodated to their physical environ-
ment. She had begun photographing this tribe in
the 1930s, when Elizabeth Forster worked as a
nurse in a Navaho community. At the age of 81,
Gilpin was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship,
and from then on until her death at 88, Gilpin
worked on recording the ruins of Canyon de
Chelly in New Mexico and Arizona. Her photo-
graphic archive is at the Amon Carter Museum in
Fort Worth, Texas.
Gilpin’s artistry has received much merited
praise, and she is acknowledged as a premier land-
scape photographer, her work showing the deep
commitment she had to the places she felt exempli-
fied a feeling of spirituality and peace. In recent
years, however, her work has come under scrutiny
by scholars concerned with issues of cultural appro-
priation. Martha Sandweiss argues that Gilpin’s
work was motivated by her outsider status as a
White person and that Gilpin was trying to get
‘‘close to people whose tradition and history seemed
deeper than her own.’’ Like Gilpin, novelist and
westerner Willa Cather was also drawn to a culture
not her own, and to some of the same locations, in
particular to Mesa Verde. In one of Cather’s books,
the main character asserts that ‘‘the relics of the
Mesa Verde belong to all people. They belong to
boys like you and me that have no other ancestors
to inherit from.’’ Sandweiss noted that passages in
Cather’sThe Professor’s Housecould have served
as text for some of Gilpin’s images: ‘‘Far above
me...I saw a little city of stone, asleep. It was still
as a sculpture...it all hung together, seemed to have
a kind of composition.’’ Gilpin did offer to illustrate
Cather’s book but received no reply.
While Gilpin did not agree with characteriza-
tions of her work as having unique qualities be-
cause of her gender, others have argued that
Gilpin’s fascination (along with that of Cather’s)
with the Southwest and its people was based on her
outsider status, not only as White woman but as a
lesbian. Jonathan Goldberg maintains that both
the writer and the photographer shared an interest
in ‘‘racialized others,’’ and negotiated their lesbian
‘‘difference’’ by immersing themselves in ‘‘exotic’’
cultures as a method of managing their outsider
status. He notes, for example, that images of
women predominate in bothThe PueblosandThe
Enduring Navaho, and that this surfeit has had
personal and cultural significance, one that is too
often underplayed by art critics and biographers,
thereby leaving us with a truncated understanding
of both Gilpin and her work.
YolandaRetter
Seealso:Ka ̈sebier, Gertrude; PictorialismBiography
Born: April 22, 1891. Education: Clarence H. White School.
Independent professional photographer, from 1915;
photographer, Central City Opera House Association,
Denver, 1932–1936; chief photographer Boeing Aircraft
Company, Wichita, Kansas, 1942–1945; Navaho IndianGILPIN, LAURA