Miguel Gandert, an associate communications and journalism professor, said he is searching for a common thread among cultures through the language of photography.
Gandert, a recent Fulbright Scholarship Award winner, kicked off the spring lecture series for UNM's Center for the Southwest Thursday at Mesa Vista Hall.
"Sometimes you get gifts," he said of his photos. "Culture knows no borders. What I try to see is how these communities define these dances and rituals."
The lecture featured vivid slides from Gandert's book, Nuevo MÇxico Profundo, as well as slides from a previous trip to Bolivia. Nuevo MÇxico Profundo tells a story through photographs of the sharing of rituals and customs from more than 400 years of Spanish colonialism and the indigenous people of the New Mexico.
"The whole thing has always been about the tri-cultural thing; the Native Americans, the Hispanics and the whites," Gandert said. "But what you find when you look at ritual, it is much more complex, much richer. Cultures share things."
Gandert pointed this out in his lecture with photographs of dances at a variety of New Mexico pueblos, including matachine and comanche dances.
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"Comanche dances are not dances by Comanche Indians, but Hispanics dancing in comanche clothing to represent something else," Gandert said.
He said the shared symbols of the pueblos in New Mexico are fascinating. Many of the symbols used by the New Mexican pueblo rituals were also used in the rituals and festivals in Bolivia, which Gandert will use his Fulbright Scholarship to study. His interest in Bolivia was sparked by a trip he took to judge a photography competition. He witnessed 28,000 people dancing simultaneously in a ritual called El Gran Poder, which he said contained many familiar images from the pueblos of New Mexico.
"This is the beginning of a three-and-one half year study of Bolivia and looking for what is the common thread," he said. "Seeing what comes from Spain and the Catholic church and what comes from the indigenous peoples."
He said his goal is to look at the whole Spanish colonial world - starting with Bolivia, which seems to be an extreme.
"It is going to be a preview of the Indo-Hispano ritual in a world that shares its history with us, yet is thousands of miles away," Gandert said. "Both New Mexico and Bolivia have over 400 years of Spanish-Catholic influence and both have a very strong Meso-American Indian influence. Bolivia is about as far away as you can get from here but this is about finding common symbols."
Gandert, a native of Espa§ola, will have a book coming out in January 2004 that will be an ethnographic study of his work. He has been involved in the study of ritual and Indo-Hispano culture in New Mexico through photography for more than 20 years. His exhibit "Nuevo Mexico Profundo: Rituals of an Indo-Hispano Homeland" was part of the National Hispanic Cultural Center's opening exhibit last October. His exhibits also have been featured at the National Museum of Art in Washington, D.C., the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Denver Art Museum. He also has displayed his work in Spain, Mexico, Norway, Russia and the Ukraine.
