Today’s featured photo is an older one, and unique among those highlighted so far: It’s the only one shot in black and white.
It also no doubt seems a little plain to most people. Boring, even. A wall? Not even the whole wall; only a part of it. With an old-boarded up window? And not even the relief of any color?
To us, it’s none of those things. Not plain, not boring, not in need of any sort of relief.
It speaks.
When people say, “If these walls could talk. . .,” they’re musing on what happens inside the structure. They forget that exterior walls have their own stories to tell, their own messages to deliver. They also forget the central role those walls play in the existence of what goes on within.
At Taos Pueblo, it’s something that’s impossible to forget.
Wings knows this; it’s a part of his blood, a part of his spirit. This image is a manifestation of that immanent cultural knowledge, as he made clear in the interpretive text that accompanied its entry in his recent one-man show, Taos Pueblo: Ancestral Places, Sacred Spaces:
MUD AND VIGAS
Several years ago, I took a series of photographs that I named Walls and Windows. It was an exploration of Taos Pueblo’s famed architecture up close, focusing not on the iconic “macro” imagery seen everywhere, but instead, on its constituent elements. This one had special resonance for me. The building of which this wall is a part is at least 800 years old. This same wall — this same home — has stood all that time, through temperatures up to 100 and down to forty below, through flooding monsoonal rains and blizzards and raging windstorms, maintaining its essential structural integrity and identity. Built of our local earth, shored up by vigas cut from the forests of our lands, it has housed and protected its family even unto the seventh generation and beyond. Every few years, the adobe is resurfaced, and beneath the vigas, the fresh mudding shows. Both new and old, it’s a refacing and refreshing that keeps the whole intact, yet it’s done using the same earth the original masons used in building. It’s yet another way our ancestors touch our hands from beyond, guiding us, protecting us, preserving the old ways for future generations in the most fundamental sense: Shelter. Home.
Signed on white matting; black wooden frame.
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But it’s not just what the imagery represents — or perhaps I should say, it’s not solely what it represents that I find so affecting. It’s the imagery itself, divorced entirely from representational cultural connotations; coupled with those connotations, it becomes something visually very powerful indeed.
Of course, it helps that I’ve seen this wall in real life. In life, it’s the warm earthen hue of sun-drenched adobe, flecked with bits of gold by way of the straw, reminiscent of the glints in the mica in the clay itself. The vigas, once the soft pale yellow of piñon stripped of its bark, are long since grayed by sun and wind and weather. The ancient window frame, dark brown wood, is weathered and patched with drips and drops of plaster from repeated mudding.
In real life, it’s a wholly unremarkable exterior wall, one like dozens of others. Or so it seems at first glance.
After Wings chose of a final pool of potential images for his show and we sat down to narrow that selection to ten entries, this one kept speaking to me. It’s not the first time. Half a dozen years ago, he compiled a series of image from the Pueblo and titled it Walls and Windows: a series of shots of both elements of the Pueblo’s iconic architecture, taken at different times of day and year, in variable weather conditions, using both color and black and white film, exploring those two physical aspects of the ancient structures in detail and depth. This photo was originally a part of that series.
And the black and white film exposes facets that color hides.
The photo’s monochrome palette frees the eye from colorful distractions to focus on the tangible physical characteristics of the wall itself. It shows the cracks in the facade in stark relief — cracks that, to an outsider, might raise fears of collapse. But the wall’s structural integrity is sound; the cracks are superficial, the result of sun and wind and weather on the surface, and will be erased with the next summer’s mudding. For now, they’re like the line’s of an elders’ face: They speak of lifetimes of lived experience, of the families and children who have lived inside the wall since it was first built a thousand years ago and more, of standing protectively beneath centuries of sun and storms, sheltering those inside, ensuring safety and survival. Like an elder, they speak of experience, but also of protection, of preservation, of doing its part to ensure that the old ways endure for the generations to come.
Similarly, preserving the image in black and white preserves the interplay of light and shadow that is so much a part of the visual beauty of this place. In color, the stark contrast of sunlight on the vigas would be nearly invisible, swallowed by the surrounding hues, earth-toned gradients merging and melding with one another until the lines are nearly indistinguishable. Here, it provides the viewer a small glimpse of the effect of Taos Pueblo’s famously mysterious light, one that not only turns walls into gold but beams into silver.
From a symbolic perspective, it’s an image that speaks, too: quietly, yes, but insistently. Different people will hear different things.
What do I hear?
A message of hope, of endurance, of survival. An assurance that surface cracks are no indicator of the strength within. An affirmation that the very impermanence of our lives is nonetheless the foundation upon which existence is built. A promise that what we do today will endure as a tangible living legacy, one that will benefit our children daily even a thousand years from now.
It’s a message we all need to hear from time to time. And a reminder to listen, not merely with our ears, but with our eyes . . . and our hearts.
Click on the image. Examine it up close. Listen.
See what it says to you.
~ 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 owner.
