Via Cowboys and Indians Magazine
December 21, 2024
Monroe Gallery of Photography specializes in 20th- and 21st-century photojournalism and humanist imagery—images that are embedded in our collective consciousness and which form a shared visual heritage for human society. They set social and political changes in motion, transforming the way we live and think—in a shared medium that is a singular intersectionality of art and journalism. — Sidney and Michelle Monroe
Via Cowboys and Indians Magazine
December 21, 2024
December 9, 2024
November 29, 2024
In the 2023 photograph Ancestral Strength by Eugene Tapahe, four Indigenous women — Cayuse, Umatilla, Newe Sogobia, and Tséstho’e — stand side by side wearing brightly colored traditional garb, staring toward the sky behind the photographer. The stark winter beauty of the background in Wyoming’s Teton National Park further highlights the women’s projected power.
In the 1949 photograph Southern Pacific Steam Engine by John Dominis, a steam engine plows through a snowy landscape at Donner Pass, California.
Both images showcase forms of strength, but that’s not the tie that binds them. Both are part of Frozen in Time, an exhibition that Monroe Gallery of Photography describes as an “imaginative survey of compelling images.” It covers a range of human experiences, from the joy of exploration in George Silk’s 1946 shot Tourists Climb Fox Glacier in Tasman National Park, taken in New Zealand, to the ugly brutality of war in Tony Vaccaro’s White Death, Pvt. Henry Irving Tannebaum Ottre, taken in Belgium in 1945.
It opens with a reception from 4-6 p.m. Friday, November 29. — Brian Sandford
details
Through January 19
Monroe Gallery of Photography
112 Don Gaspar Avenue
505-992-0800, monroegallery.com
By Kathaleen Roberts
November 24, 2024
Winter brings both beauty and brutality.
Open at Santa Fe’s Monroe Gallery of Photography, “Frozen in Time” brings images of both joy and despair by some of the most renowned American photojournalists. The photographs cover the 2016 protests during the Standing Rock pipeline construction, a skating waiter at St. Moritz, Switzerland, in the early 1900s, and images of the grim winter conditions during World War II.
Several of the photojournalists worked for Life magazine.
"It always makes for a beautiful, serene, contemplative experience,” said Michelle Monroe, gallery co-owner, of the frosty season. “We know it’s cold, we know it’s quiet, we know there is a veil of light.”
Alfred Eisenstaedt/Life Picture Collection: Ice Skating Waiter, St. Moritz, 1932
Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “Ice Skating Waiter” encapsulates the grace of skating while balancing a tray of glasses and liquor.
“He had a very rudimentary camera with glass plates,” Monroe said. “He said the whole thing was a technical challenge.”
The photographer focused on the chair until the waiter swanned by.
Tony Vaccaro’s photograph of soldiers partially buried in snow during the 88-day Battle of Hürtgen Forest captures the longest fight on German ground of World War II. An estimated 24,000 were killed, wounded or captured.
“There was no one more uncomfortable than the other,” Monroe said. “You couldn’t even find any comfort being together. (Vaccaro) said there was a lot of dark humor.”
In 2023, Navajo photographer Eugene Tapahe took “Ancestral Strength” in Wyoming’s Grand Teton National Park.
Tapahe was studying at Utah’s Brigham Young University when the pandemic hit. He decided to take four Native jingle dancers (two of whom were his daughters) across the country.
“The jingle dress has always been used for healing,” Monroe said. “Since the schools were closed, perhaps he could heal the country. They went all over performing. It had a tremendous effect on people.”
Those stops included Mount Rushmore, Yosemite and New York’s Central Park.
Ryan Vizzions photographed the protests over the Standing Rock pipeline in 2017, including a portrait of a medicine man.
“He was a spiritual counselor and guide for everything there to keep people in focus,” Monroe said.
“(For) a lot of the older photographers, in order to be put on the front page, it was to get out there and get a shot of this latest snowstorm,” Monroe said. “She was part of the Photo League (cooperative.) They were shut down by the Red Scare movement for being subversive.”
The photographs also include images of the 1939 Russo-Finnish War, harsh winter conditions in the northern Soviet Union taken during its collapse in the 1990s and several ice skating scenes, including Truman Capote at New York’s famed Rockefeller Plaza in 1959, as well as tranquil snow scenes of the American West.
Monroe Gallery specializes in photojournalism. It was the recipient of the 2010 Alfred Eisenstaedt Award for Excellence in Photojournalism.
'FROZEN IN TIME'
WHEN: Opening Reception on Friday, Nov. 29, 4-6 pm; exhibition continues through Jan. 19, 2025
WHERE: Monroe Gallery, 112 Don Gaspar Ave., Santa Fe
MORE INFO: monroegallery.com, 505-992-0800