Photographs currently on display in Santa Fe
If you are in Santa Fe, New Mexico you can view a selection of my photos in person at Living Threads Studio or the Drury Plaza Hotel. The photos were selected from over 200 portraits taken during a 2-year period in Oaxaca, Mexico, that became the award-winning book, Oaxaca Stories in Cloth.
40” x 60” photos framed in black stained walnut at Living Threads Studio, Santa Fe.
The images celebrate cultural diversity by focusing on indigenous community fashion and the people who continue to dress in the way of their cultural heritage on a daily basis.
The photos are all taken with a digital camera and lit with off-camera flash.
The printing process is called Silver Halide or Chromogenic, an elegant and supremely high quality archival printing method. These are photographic prints on photographic paper (as opposed to inkjet prints, which is how most printing is done currently). They are covered with a UV protective, scratch resistant laminate that serves the same function as glass. They are backed with aluminum and, in most cases, framed in Walnut.
10% of all sales goes to indigenous resilience in Latin America.
The printing and framing is done by local Santa Fe craftspeople at Visions Photo Lab and Gavin Collier Framing
Photos on display at the Drury Plaza Hotel in Santa Fe, 828 Paseo De Peralta
Francisca Pastor is a Mazatec woman from San Francisco Huehuetlan, a village in the verdant Sierra Madre Occidental of Oaxaca. She is photographed in her dining room.
Limited Edition: 1/7. Size: 60”x 40.5” Stained Walnut Frame
Price: $6,500
Norberta Merino of San Pedro Amuzgo holds the backstrap loom she uses to weave her stunning huipiles. Amuzgo is her first language, weaving, perhaps, is her second. She will spend months weaving each of the huipiles she makes. Her and other Amuzgo women create some of the finest weavings in Mexico.
Limited Edition: 1/7. Size: 40.5”x 53”. Stained Walnut Frame
Price: $6,500
Mother and daughter stand in the doorway of the kitchen in San Martin Intunyoso. In this Triqui village community fashion is thriving and worn by all the women of the village.
Limited Edition: 1/7. Size: 40.5”x 64”. Stained Walnut Frame
Price: $6,500
Pascual Perez is a traditional Mixtec farmer from Santa Maria Zacatepec. Very few men dress in the traditional way anymore. The style of Pascual’s clothing predates the Spanish conquest of 1519. So does the heritage of the corn that grows around him.
Limited Edition: 1/7. Size: 40.5”x 59”. Stained Walnut Frame
Price: $6,500
Petra Jimenez carries firewood in Laguna Chicahuaxtla, Oaxaca. She is Triqui and wearing a handwoven huipil that took her several months to weave. Commuity fashion, as elegant as it may be, is made to live and work in.
Limited Edition: 1/4. Size: 44”x 88”. Black Maple floater frame.
Price: $11,500
Photos on display at Living Threads Studio, 1610 D Lena St, Santa Fe, New Mexico.
This Mazatec farmer, Simion Alvarez, stands strong and proud with a coa, a tool of his trade used to cultivate corn in the sierra where neither tractor no ox teams can work because of the steepness of the mountain sides.
Limited Edition: 1/7. Size: 40.5”x 56”. Stained Walnut Frame
Price: $6,500
The women of San Bartolome Quialana bring food to their kin each morning as they work in the corn fields surrounding the village. Elvira carries tamales and a beverage called tejate made of cacao, corn, pecans and tropical seeds.
Limited Edition: 1/7. Size: 40.5”x 61”. Stained Walnut Frame
Price: $6,500
Amalia Vazquez disappears into the corn San Melchor Betaza just as an ancient adobe house once did, leaving nothing behind but the brick porch pillars.
Limited Edition: 2/7. Size: 40.5”x 55”. Stained Walnut Frame
Price: $7,150
Sofia Ojeda stands in the doorway of an ancient shrine on the outskirts of her home village of Santo Domingo Roayaga. She lives in what I have come to call the valley of white cranes. In one after another village, the traditional dress of the women is variants of white on white. At the head of the valley there is a market town where an elder resident explained to me that when she was younger and all the women of the villages still dressed in their communities way, on market day they would arrive, walking down the trails, up the road, from all the many villages, and look, she said, like white cranes descending on a pond.
Limited Edition: 1/7. Size: 40.5”x 59”. Stained Walnut Frame
Price: $6,500
Petra Gomes stands among the gigantic agave plants the she taps for their sap, or agua miel, which is used to make pulque, a fermented beverage of ancient recipe. Her livelihood, like that of her mother and grandmother before, is derived from the plants that surround her. The blouse she wears is embroidered in a way shared in common by all the women of this region. Among the symbols on the blouse are embroidered bundles that symbolize corn, zig zags that represent the mountains that the Mixe people live in and the rivers that flow through them, and a star-burst shape that is predominant in the design, that symbolizes the agave plants of this land. Tejas, Tlahuitoltepec.
Limited Edition: 1/7. Size: 40.5”x 61”. Stained Walnut Frame
Price: $6,500
Keeping the dust at bay in San Juan Pinyas. Traditional dress is alive and ever evolving. It is not defined by how it is made, but by the shared identity that it conveys. This woman’s blouse is hand embroidered in a style shared by the women of this community. Her skirt, which is made of a purchased synthetic velvet cloth, is also of a style shared in common by the women of San Juan. Seen anywhere in the region, she, or others from her village would be immediately identifiable as being from San Juan Pinyas. Community fashion conveys a strong sense of belonging.
Limited Edition: 1/11. Size: 24.5”x 36”. Free Float Back Frame.
Price: $2,100
Anastacia Hernandez of San Francisco Huehuetlan laughs at a funny moment in life. In this case suddenly finding herself being invited into a photo shoot with a foreign photographer creating a visual record of community fashion in Oaxaca. Her and her village’s way of daily dress has suddenly become part of the telling of a larger story.
Limited Edition: 1/11. Size: 24.5”x 36”. Free Float Back Frame.
Price: $2,100
Erlinda Mateos of the Ayuuk village San Juan Cotzocon weaves a huipil on a backstrap loom. Though less and less women in Cotzocon continue to dress in their community fashion, most of the women of the community are still prolific weavers, producing textiles that they will sell near and far.
Limited Edition: 1/28. Size: 16.5” x 24”. Stained Walnut Frame
Price: $1,050
Albina Justina Chavez lives in the village of Solaga in the Sierra Madre Oriental. Above I wrote about the valley of white cranes. Solaga is one of the villages in this valley where the women dress in variants of white on white. Of all the villages I photographed in, Solaga is the one closest to losing the usage of its community fashion. Albina, who was in her 90’s, was one of only four women in Solaga who still dressed in their ancestral way on a daily basis.
Limited Edition: 1/28. Size: 16.5” x 25.5”. Stained Walnut Frame
Price: $1,050
Maria Antonia, exuberant in the creative work of embroidering cloth into life. San Vicente Coatlan.
Limited Edition: 1/28. Size: 16.5” x 25.5”. Stained Walnut Frame
Price: $1,050
Crecencio Marino is a retired farmer and one of the few men in Oaxaca who continues to dress in the ancestral way of his heritage. While photographing him I asked him why his machete was dull. A sharp machete is easy to spot as the cutting edge, recently filed, shines like silver. He said my machete is dull because my eyes have gone dull. I can no longer see well enough to work my fields. What use have I for a sharp machete? Santiago Ixtayutla.
Limited Edition: 1/28. Size: 16.5” x 23.5”. Stained Walnut Frame
Price: $1,050
I asked Luisa Molina of Yalalag, a village in the valley of white cranes where only 40 women still dress in the old way of the village, if she could imagine Yalalag without the clothing of the community. Her response; “Yalalag would not be Yalalag without our clothing!”
Limited Edition: 1/4. Size: 44.5”x 74”. Stained Walnut Frame
Price: $10,000