Our introduction to Ghost Ranch, New Mexico started as a literary one, far from the southwest in our birth city of Brooklyn, New York, through books containing letters exchanged by Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams. Stieglitz had never traveled to the Southwest himself. O’Keeffe and Adams would correspond sending him detailed descriptions of the land as well as their visual interpretations. Stieglitz was able to “feel” the West through their writings.
In a 1937 letter to Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams wrote,
It is all very beautiful and magical here – a quality which can not be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake it into you. The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro, where everything is sidewise under you and over you, and the clocks stopped long ago.
Ansel Adams
In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz from Ghost Ranch, 9/21/37
O’Keeffe wrote,
In the evening, with the sun at your back it looks like an ocean, like water. The color there is different…the blue-green of the sage and the mountains, the wildflowers in bloom. It's a different kind of color from any I'd ever seen – there's nothing like that in north Texas or even Colorado. And it's not just the color that attracted me either. The world is so wide up there, so big.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe, A Lifeby Roxanne Robinson (page 327)
These letters also formed ourfirst impressions of the West; not the West of television and movies, but the West as seen through the eyes of the artist. We were able, from our urban environment, to create a visual picture of the Southwest for ourselves, and a desire to go to New Mexico. Separately, we visited New Mexico several times and finally moved there (David in 1978 and Janet in 1980). Together, we began exploring our new home.
On a trip home from the Bisti Badlands where David was photographing, we drove the back roads from Cuba, New Mexico into Abiquiu. As we approached Ghost Ranch the sky darkened to a deep silvery purple with the coming of an intense summer rain storm. The air was charged, the mountains lit with an eerily beautiful light. There was raw power everywhere; the sky, the earth, the clouds.
The idea to work there did not come to us right away. It took many more years before we formulated the idea, met with Joe Keesecker, the Director of Ghost Ranch and received his permission to work on this project. As husband and wife and as gallery partners, we already knew we were able to work together successfully in life, but we had never collaborated on a photographic project before. The idea was daunting, but we shared an essential ingredient - we both had a great admiration for the beauty of Ghost Ranch.
Over the next five years, often lugging our equipment, (David shooting with a large and cumbersome 8 x 10" field camera, Janet with a 4 x 5" field camera), our tripods, and most times, our young son Zachary, and on some occasions Janet's 80 year old mother, Esther Goldberg, we set out to cover much of 22, 000 acres that are Ghost Ranch. It was never our intent to document Ghost Ranch. Keeping our eyes and hearts open, each looking for our own subject matter, we began making photographs. What did this place mean to us? What does it do for us, and how could we interpret it through a lens on a flat piece of light sensitive material? Over time our images began to answer these questions for us, and point us on to others.
Before exploring Ghost Ranch in greater depth for ourselves, our perception of the place was formed very strongly by Georgia O'Keeffe's imagery and influence. The Ghost Ranch logo, a cow skull designed by O'Keeffe, hangs prominently over the entrance to the ranch, and is indeed the first thing that welcomes visitors. O'Keeffe was possessive of the area, especially her favorite mountain, Pedernal, which dominates the landscape from every direction for miles.
"It is my private mountain." she explained. "God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it."
Her sense of ownership was a bit intimidating, and we knew that we would have to find someway to uncover images, interpretations and viewpoints that would broaden our perception of place.
From the photographs and philosophy of our cherished friend, colleague and mentor, Eliot Porter, we learned much. While writing in his 1987 autobiography about photography as an art he states,
Before all else a work of art is the creation of love, love for the subject first and for the medium second. Love is the fundamental necessity underlying the need to create, underlying the emotion that gives it form, and from which grows the finished product that is presented to the world. Love is the general criterion by which the rare photograph is judged. It must contain it to be not less than the best of which the photographer is capable.
This collaboration is an extension of our relationship, another offspring. We can never really be finished with a project such as this. Let this volume be more of a pause in our work and not the final conclusion, as Ghost Ranch will always have a place in our hearts.
Janet Russek and David Scheinbaum
Santa Fe, New Mexico 1997