Today we close our recent exploration of the Pueblo’s iconic architecture as a source of inspiration for its own artists with a brief look at its appearance in Wings’s others chosen medium: photography. The earlier entries in this series covered the architectural motif in other media: first, sculpture, looking at how two of his relatives create Pueblos in miniature; next, in some of the various ways it manifests in Wings’s own silverwork; and finally, its role as inspiration for one of his signature series, mediated through the imagery captured in some of his photography.
Today, though, I want to focus on the photography alone. More, I want to look at it from one specific vantage point. I know that I’ve already posted this photo here at The NDN Silver Blog, in the first week of launching this online space; it appeared on a Thursday, and the point then was to introduce how we would approach a particular social-media meme here. Since that time, however, we’ve been devoting Mondays to exploring the photographic images form Wings’s recent one-man show, Taos Pueblo: Ancestral Places, Sacred Spaces, and the photo above was the lead image in the exhibition. I want to continue this exploration today, within the context of the last few days’ review of ancient Pueblo architecture in contemporary Pueblo art.
With regard to the image above, I want to begin by revisiting what he had to say about it in the narrative that accompanied its entry in the show:
STORIES
Our lives are lived in stories — and in stories.
Perhaps the first thing visitors to Taos Pueblo notice about our historic multi-level architecture is that it is multi-level — our ancestors, a thousand years ago, divided homes into stories in larger communal buildings.
In a way, each story is symbolic of the other kind of story: the little piece of our collective history written by each family, each inhabitant, of each of these stories made of earth and straw. If you look closely, you can see each individual piece of straw embedded in the adobe wall, each essential to the wall’s strength and cohesiveness and ability to stand, whole.
So, too, is each of our people: Individuals, with their own lives and histories and roles to play in our culture and in the historical narrative of our people. Each unique, each with his or her own story — and each essential to our strength and cohesiveness and ability to stand, whole.
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If anything should be clear by now about the role the Pueblo’s unique architecture plays in its culture and arts, it’s that the two are inextricably intertwined: the one is integral to the others. And as yesterday’s post here should make clear, every ancient home, from every angle, at every time of day, in every season, in every kind of weather, has its own story to tell. Stories of the people, today and more than a thousand years ago; stories of the earth and sun and sky and water, older than time itself. Every image captures a moment in the millennium and more of stories the home has to tell, passed down through the generations of people who live there through the magic of words and the mystery of ancestral memory.
On the same day that he took the photo above, he took the one below — from the same vantage point, but back a few steps to provide a wider, longer view. It’s an image he considered for inclusion in the show, but ultimately discarded in favor of the closer shot with the grainier, grittier detail and the close emphasis on specific elements.
This one, the broader view, was entitled Calling Back the Sun. it’s a reference to ritual, yes, but more than that, a meditation on existence and survival. This was taken some six or seven years ago, when the area was in the throes of a particularly harsh winter punctuated by brief warm-ups that were both too early and too intense, leading to the thaw visible in the photo, with water pooled here and there. Climate change was already here and wreaking havoc with weather patterns, but at the time, we could still dismiss them as oddities.
On another day that same winter, a brilliantly sunny one with a high that barely passed zero, he sent me up the icy steps of one of the homes further down the row pictured here to deliver a gift to a great-aunt, an elder seated contentedly by a crackling fire in the dimness of her ancestral home, to help her buy wood to keep the fire going. She was not visibly bothered by the cold outdoors: her village home was warm, and she was comfortable living in the old way, the way of her parents and grandparents going back a thousand years and more.
And that is, perhaps, the story of this particular photo. Yes, the sun is essential to life, and it must return every day to warm the earth and the people for them to survive. In winter, the journey is more difficult; its light, like its strength, is weaker, and it must rest sooner in the day than at other times of year. It needs the help of the people to call it back, day after day, to complete the arduous journey that permits the earth to continue to turn in its own place, and keeps the world, and the people, alive for another day, another winter, another year.
And so the people do their part — in part, simply by living. Living in the old way, in the way of the people, as it has always been. No matter the bitter cold, no matter the dampness hanging in the air, no matter the weakness of the light, they remain: The are still here, they survive, live and thrive, despite the harshness of the elements, the vagaries of climate change, the invasion of would-be conquerors with minds set on annexation, appropriation, assimilation, extermination.
And still, like Wings, they tell their stories.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
