Holly Roberts has a big yellow painting/photograph called "Mud Truck" hanging in the UNM Art Museum.
"We had just gotten a new Toyota truck, and it was supposed to be a little one, but it was huge," she said. "I just felt weird driving this enormous thing around. I was trying to come to terms driving this huge thing of metal."
UNM student Linda Garrett was drawn to the piece's high energy.
"I looked at that and thought, 'Wow! I can do that,'" Garrett said. "I have so many photographs. (They'd work as) Christmas presents."
Roberts is one of 25 photographers published in the new book Photography: New Mexico, which has been turned into an exhibit in the UNM Art Museum's downstairs gallery. There is also work by celebrated photographers such as Joel-Peter Witkin, Patrick Nagatani, Leigh Anne Langwell and Thomas Barrow.
There's a reception Friday at 6 p.m. in the gallery, and many of the photographers will be there. In the book, which will be on sale at the show, each photographer is represented by eight pieces. The exhibit is a scaled-down version of the book, but everyone in the book made it into the show. The work ranges from highly traditional to multimedia experimental, like Thomas Barrow's 3-D photography montages where he uses black caulk and silicone and random stuff you'd buy at a hardware store. His grainy photographs were made with a pinhole camera. Barrow is also the one who put together Photography: New Mexico.
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"It's just a chance to put all these people together," said curator Michele Penhall. "It's a cross section of photographers who not only live here, but they have this connection to New Mexico. Joel-Peter Witkin's images, for instance - they're not New Mexico landscapes by any stretch, but he lives and works here a lot of the time."
There's a small room of the more experimental works, which includes Betty Hahn, Barrow and Roberts. Hahn sewed onto her photos, and some of them she turned into colorful prints that look like paintings.
"Here we have embroidery and gum print and actual sewing on this, so it's a very feminine kind of thing," Penhall said of a Hahn print. "This is 1973, and she was doing this a long, long time ago, so she was really quite out there in the forefront. This is a very iconic image of the Lone Ranger and Tonto."
There's a towering triptych of trees that look like photo negatives or watercolor or ghosts. It's intense and captivating to behold. UNM student Billie Joe Miller marked it as his favorite in the show.
"It just became its own thing, and it had this power," Miller said. "It made me want to speak back to it and make work and continue to have a conversation with it. In general, the whole show, I liked it a lot. It was playful in the best kind of way."
