March 24, 2024
Santa Fe, New Mexico Photography
2024
Interested in where to find Santa Fe, New Mexico Photography in 2024? Learn about how so many professional photographers have found their way to Santa Fe. In our latest podcasts, here are the stories of what inspired these world-class artists to join the Santa Fe photography scene! Great education with Anne Kelly.
Santa Fe, New Mexico Origin Stories
I came to New Mexico for Beaumont Newhall growing up and always kind of having a very early interest in photography. Beaumont was kind of my hero, you know, as other kids might have, like Mickey Mantle in baseball or some, someone in sports or someone in art, I don’t know. But Beaumont was someone who I read every word at the time. I had read every word he wrote and it was after I went to a lecture he gave at the Metropolitan Museum of Art on the occasion of Paul Strand exhibit. It was Paul Strand and he was speaking and it was after actually seeing him and, you know, hearing him speak that I decided I wanted to move here and see if I could work with him, which was a total fantasy.
When I moved to Santa Fe in the late seventies, I was working on making these prints for this book. And one of the first things I did with Beaumont besides working with him on the Beaumont helped me edit. I had about 3000 pictures, and photographs, and Beaumont helped me with the editing. He helped me with the selection, and then, you know, this was still, I was getting to meet him, but then he offered to write the introduction to the book, which was something I would’ve been too afraid to ask him.
David Sheinbaum – Photographer and Educator
I’m originally from Colorado and I moved to Santa Fe a little over 20 years ago originally to go to art school. I studied photography at the College of Santa Fe and just really loved Santa Fe. And I’m still here.
I started studying photography pretty young, so by the time I had graduated from high school, I was looking, I, I honestly couldn’t think of anything else I would wanna do in college, other than study art and photography. And it was hard to find a photo program that, that had, you know, had something to add that I hadn’t already kind of delved into. And I’d always loved Santa Fe, New Mexico. And at the time the College of Santa Fe was in the process of building the Marion Center for Photographic Arts and David Sheinbaum was heading the program and they had just tons of really amazing photo classes that were things that I hadn’t studied as of yet that, and I’d always loved Santa Fe.
Anne Kelley – Photography Art Dealer and Art Curator
Santa Fe is a special place. When I was a kid growing up in Albuquerque, my mother used to take us up to Santa Fe. She was a big antique collector at the time, back in the seventies, there was several antique shops along the Plaza. So she would go up and just go from an antique shop to antique shop there. So we would come up to Santa Fe before the canyon road and the art galleries everywhere. It was much more local art. And it was just so different from anywhere else being from New Mexico, it was completely different than Farmington where all my family was.
Albuquerque, where, we lived. It was when we were talking about, be a way we were in Atlanta and we were talking about buying a place. The lab there in Santa Fe came up. It was like, wow, it is just kind of a godsend. The light there, about late September from the middle of September to almost like the first week in November, the light in Santa Fe, just that angle and the, the shadow and the kind of golden quality of it is just is different long shadows just has a and feel. We have really good air quality too, you know?
The Adobe walls are part of it. And then, you know, in the winter, when you have the, the mountain covers the snow and you have that right light and the right sunset, and you know how it close, it just lights up. I mean, the mountain will light up like a candle. You don’t have many places that have that. We have really good air quality. It’s like today here guy was so clear and so incredibly blue that it’s just like breathtaking. When you have that kind of light, you have that kind of air quality, there’s some to be said about golden light. Los Angeles is nasty. It’s the air quality. Watching outdoor sporting events or anything like that. The color of the glow there of that light in LA is unlike anywhere.
When the opportunity came to buy the lab, it was the only place really that I’ll ever be able to follow this type of opportunity because of all the artists, and the photo Mecca that Santa Fe is – especially when we first moved there. When we first bought the lab, we were still doing a lot of copywork for all the galleries. Back then, we were doing all the transparencies for all the big galleries. Gerald Peters Art Gallery, New Mexico Museum of Art. All those places were shooting transparencies of their inventory. We were the ones processing it. We were the ones doing all that at the time. It was a great way to get to know the community.
