A Father's Day Recollection
I have felt myself intrinsically pulled towards Santa Fe since my very first visit in 2014. The swirl of color, texture, and spice immediately caught me like a maelstrom and I find myself returning again and again over the intervening decade with an increasing pace. My increasing fascination with the city and it’s culture has caused me to reflect on why this particular geography has such a power over me.
When I was growing up in the 1990s, my father, a traditional landscape photographer, took multiple trips out to Santa Fe to attend filmmaking workshops. The proliferation of home video technology had opened up the world of independent filmmaking and Dad wanted to explore this brave new world. While he never made the jump from film photography to independent filmmaking, the city and culture of Santa Fe made an indelible impression on him and greatly impacted his work over the next decade. He returned with talismans and tall tales of the Land of Enchantment and its capital city. New Mexican, Southwestern art and ornamentation began accumulating in his studio and spilled over into our living areas. Woven blankets and ponchos, turquoise accoutrements, red chile ristras, and photographs of dusty New Mexican landscapes and architecture all came to decorate our home. I became enchanted with these vestiges of this mythical American Southwest.
Time passes, and Dad passes. I graduate college, I move to the mountains of Colorado, forging my own path to the American West. I am infatuated with snowboarding and climbing in the Rocky Mountains. I am in my mid twenties and excited to be blazing a trail forward, creating my own adventures and discovering who I am as a newly minted “adult” 1,300 miles from my hometown. It’s been a long time since I had thought about the interior decoration of my childhood home. All of it floods back into my consciousness the first morning of my first visit to Santa Fe in 2014. Red chiles hanging in large bunches along the plaza, dreamcatchers and bundles of sage that hang in the windows of shops, bleached cow skulls and coils of rope, the iconography that was mythologized in my childhood now suddenly recontextualized in a new and proper setting. My friends and I spent 2 days walking the town, taking it all in, and ordering green chile on everything. It was a beautiful trip and one I will never forget. Subsequent trips have each had a different flavor, colored by unique experiences, attractions, and companions. It’s also different now that I am a photographer myself. I see the town with new eyes, trained to find color, contrast and patterns in the natural and manmade landscape and compose them in a viewfinder. And on this particular trip, it’s my father’s camera that I’m looking through.
There’s a unique shade of nostalgia that I feel walking the streets of Santa Fe with Dad’s camera slung around my neck. It’s the Canon EOS Rebel 2000, his lightweight “b-camera” to the Hasselblad, with a new 85mm 1.8 that I picked up recently. I wonder what he saw in the colorful streets of this city 30 years ago, I wonder if they’re the same things catching my eye now. Probably not the same vendors, but certainly the same architecture. The plaza of the governor’s palace with it’s turquoise timbers, or the clocktower of Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi, there are so many iconic landmarks. I am a very different photographer than he was, and in some ways I am a very different man then he was, but there is no doubt that his passion for the Land of Enchantment has passed on to me. I wish we could have experienced this place together.
I can’t help but feel, as I hold his camera up to my eye and fire off a shot of a local craftsman binding bouquets, that he is indeed here with me. If we can use the same equipment, on the same stretch of road, then we are inhabiting the same space, separated only by the dimension of time. This is the closest I have felt to him in a long time. The shutter clicks, the mirror slaps, 36 frames of Portra 160. This roll becomes one of the best I have ever shot, and I can't shake the feeling that Dad and I shot it together. This enchantment lingers for days, long after I have crossed the border back into Colorado. I turn it over like a precious artifact, I hold it close, I keep it secret until today, when I share it with you.
Happy Father’s Day 2023
