by Eva Dameron
Daily Lobo
Deserts have colored America's identity and mythology.
But it wasn't until the 1950s that the West began rapidly developing into what it is today, said Michael Certo, education curator for the UNM Art Museum.
"Contemporary Desert Photography: The Other Side of Paradise" features 26 photographers' works from Palm Springs Desert Museum's collection.
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Retired UNM art professor Patrick Nagatani has a photo in the show, the only set-up image.
"It's tabletop photography," Certo said. "He used to build models in L.A. for the film business, so he makes all these miniatures."
The photo is from Nagatani's late-'90s project in which he pretended to find buried cars at famous land sites.
"He took landscape photographs of famous places and then pretended like there was a classic car that was excavated there," Certo said. "He has this whole persona of being a Japanese archeologist that was on an archeologist crew that discovered all these things - famous landscapes around the world - but it's all tabletop photography he did in his studio."
The exhibit opens up the room with its clear skyscapes, vast horizon lines where the roads disappear into a vanishing point, and its images of urban decay. Photographer Tom Barrow, professor emeritus at UNM, said aesthetics are ultimately more important than concepts.
"The cool thing is you've got the desert landscape - which to a lot of people might be really boring - but there are so many perspectives and takes on it which are really beautiful," Certo said. "That's what Tom (Barrow) was talking about last night. You can have a lot of conceptual and intellectual ideas about photography, but, for him, the picture still had to be interesting. But, ultimately, he considered himself a picture maker. A lot of contemporary photographers are all about the concept. It's very abstract. It's not about anything."
The photographs show it's still possible to experience the West pre-1950s, Certo said.
"The cool thing about a city like Albuquerque is in 15 minutes, you can drive out of the city," he said. "That's different from the East Coast. People from the East Coast don't have that experience. Within 15, 20 minutes, we've gone from urban or suburban to the frontier - what it was like before we got here. That's the desert
experience."
The museum staff did a project with schoolchildren in which they made up stories behind the exhibit's photographs.
"Every picture, you can manufacture a story behind it," Certo said. "Each one has a different narrative. How did they get there? Where does the road lead? A lot of these have roads that just kind of go off into the distance, train tracks that just stop in the middle of the desert."
"Contemporary
Desert Photography: The Other Side of Paradise"
UNM Art Museum
Through Feb. 10
Tuesday-Friday
9 a.m.-4 p.m.
Tuesday
5 p.m.-8 p.m.
Sunday
1 p.m.-4 p.m.
