Who: New Mexico History Museum
What: Deborah Blanche adds to the Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe lecture series.
When: Sunday, May 17, 2-3 p.m.
Where: Masonic Lodge of Santa Fe, 431 Paseo de Peralta.
Contact: (505) 476-1141

The intrepid life and photography of Laura Gilpin come to life 2-3 p.m. Sunday, May 17, as writer and actor Deborah Blanche adds her performance to the Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe lecture series.

This free event will be at the Masonic Lodge of Santa Fe, 431 Paseo de Peralta.

Gilpin, a Colorado native who later lived in Santa Fe, set new standards for landscape photography in the American West. She packed her equipment on horseback to photograph the source of the Rio Grande, did studio portraits for society matrons, directed pilots to “fly low” over Shiprock to capture the light and shadows from every possible angle. Gilpin experimented with every subject and photographic technique for over fifty-five years before receiving widespread national recognition for it.

She kept at it, too. In 1979, the then-88-year-old Gilpin took her final photographs while leaning out of a small plane.

Besides landscape photographer, Gilpin excelled at still-life, portrait, commercial, documentary and aerial photography, as well as the existing methods of printmaking. She also published several books for which she was photographic illustrator, writer and designer.

As a young woman, Gilpin studied violin at the New England Conservatory of Music. In difficult economic times, she operated poultry farms to supplement her finances, as well as her family’s. A true Renaissance woman, both accomplished and advanced in the realms of practical skills, artistic vision, social attitudes and racial politics, she is said by those who knew her to have “filled the room” with her presence.

That’s the goal of Deborah Blanche, who will bring Gilpin’s story to life.

“I admire her perseverance and dedication to quality in aspects of her work,” Blanche says of Gilpin. “She invented new projects for herself constantly, challenging herself as a working artist. She remained determined to earn her livelihood from photography and to make her home in the West where the land inspired her, rather than pursue a more lucrative career elsewhere.”

Blanche has been working in theatre, storytelling, film, radio and TV since her teens. After completing a Master of Fine Arts Degree at the University of Oklahoma, she studied in Great Britain where a passion for “original” theatre production was ignited. Since that time she has become best known for the one-woman plays, Chautauqua characters and storytelling programs that she researches, writes and performs locally, nationally and internationally. She also offers workshops, coaching sessions, and lecture-demonstrations related to her performances and theatrical skills.

Highly dramatized, Blanche’s style walks a fine line between theatre and storytelling, with material from the Hispanic, Native American, cowboy, and frontier cultures of the American West and Southwest.

In this show, meet “Miss Gilpin” as she was in the year 1954 – a confident, ebullient woman in her early 60s. As Miss Gilpin, Blanche narrates a slide show that includes images from her first Lumiere color prints to many from her best-known book The Enduring Navajo. (The slide show of 30 pristine images is made possible by arrangement with the Amon Carter Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.) Miss Gilpin will answer questions from the audience and tell some of the behind-the-camera stories about the photographic retrospective that parallels her life.

Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe, on view at the Palace of the Governors through Oct. 25, charts the development of the City Different through the work of many photographers over the decades. The project, curated by photographer and educator Krista Elrick and Palace of the Governors Curator of Photography Mary Anne Redding, showcases outstanding photographs that reveal the aesthetic excellence of the artists working in Santa Fe since the 1850s. While the images document the city, they have also been used, historically, as part of the marketing of the Santa Fe image and as a draw to other artists.

The exhibition, lecture series, and publication of Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe are sponsored by the Scanlan Family Foundation, Verve Gallery of Photography, New Mexico Council on Photography, New Mexico Humanities Council, Visual Arts Gallery at the Santa Fe Community College, Photography Department/Marion Center for Photographic Arts at the College of Santa Fe, Scheinbaum & Russek LTD., Santa Fe 400th Anniversary Partnership, Santa Fe Art Foundation, Andrew Smith Gallery, Museum of New Mexico Foundation, Palace Guard, Phyllis and Edward Gladden Endowment Fund, and the Women’s Board of the Museum of New Mexico.