Boots and Wurlitzer is from 1977 and Fritz Scholder is from 1982, and between those two dates sits most of what made Santa Fe photography what it is. Elliott McDowell was here for all of it, printing beautifully, photographing the odd and the specific, and turning his camera on the painters who were turning this town into a subject.
Biography
McDowell studied with Ansel Adams between 1972 and 1975, and with Laura Gilpin in 1975. He has exhibited continuously since, and his photographs are held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Denver Art Museum, and the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson. His work has appeared in American Photographer, Art in America, and Rolling Stone.
In the collection’s words
“Putting my eye to a camera has always been a passageway into another dimension. Although the eye is in this world it looks into another, a place that becomes captured and held in timelessness. What is seen is filtered by all that has come to make up the viewer/photographer, a lifetime of experiences that have been processed by the mind, heart, and soul. This filter gives the image a personal signature.”
That lineage matters to us more than most. Gilpin is in this collection, and so is McDowell, and the fact that one taught the other is not a footnote. It is the reason a photograph made in New Mexico in 1977 still looks like it was made here.
Continue exploring
- Laura Gilpin, who taught him
- UNBROKEN and Ceremony and Ritual, two shows he was part of
- George Nobechi and Kim Richardson
- Photographs in the collection
- Why creative people choose Santa Fe
