Lee Marmon, America’s best known and most widely respected Native American photographer, recently sold his original photos as well as his personal papers to the Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections (CSWR). More than 65,000 images were included in the acquisition. CSWR director Mike Kelly worked many months to arrange the purchase for the library.
Photo: Lee Marmon (l.) working with Fellows at the Center for SW Research on his collection.
“The Marmon photos are a spectacular record of New Mexico Native peoples and the New Mexico landscape. We could not be more thrilled to keep this collection in New Mexico,” says Kelly.
Lee Marmon was born in 1925 in Laguna, New Mexico. He took his first photograph in 1936 of a motor vehicle accident on the old U.S. Route 66 in Laguna. Still, a few years passed before he returned to Laguna from WWII service to begin his photography career in earnest.
He bought his first professional camera in 1947 at age 22 and began by photographing the elders of Laguna Pueblo as he went about daily business. Between 1949 and 1966 he and his father ran the Laguna Trading Post and Lee also served as the Laguna Postmaster from 1950-1956.
After his father died he moved to Palm Springs, California where he worked as the official photographer for the Bob Hope Desert Classic and as a free-lance photographer whose work appeared in leading newspapers and magazines including: “The New York Times,” “The Los Angeles Times,” “Time Magazine,” and “The Saturday Evening Post.” In 1972 he was commissioned by President and Mrs. Richard M. Nixon for a White House photo collection of tribal pottery from New Mexico.
In 1982 he returned to live in Laguna. He contributed to the award-winning PBS series “Surviving Columbus.” He was honored with an exhibit at the Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian in 1999. His first book “The Pueblo Imagination” was produced in 2003 in cooperation with his daughter, well-known author Leslie Marmon Silko, and poets Joy Harjo and Simon Ortiz.
His photographic output is phenomenal and he still works at the age of 84. Many images are already digitized and available to researchers via the UL’s digital archive at E Content.
Over the next several years the CSWR intends to scan and post 1,000 more images. Making the collection discoverable involves individually scanning each image, creating a record for each photo with caption, date, size and other important information and placing it in the digital archive. A process that is easier to describe than to do at times. Once uploaded into the digital archive, these images are available world-wide giving researchers a chance to see what is available in our collections before planning an expensive research trip.
If you are interested in the learning more about the CSWR photographic collections or contributing to their preservation and expansion please contact Mike Kelly at mtk@unm.edu or by calling (505) 277-7107.
Media Contact: Karen Wentworth, (505) 277-5627; e-mail: kwent2@unm.edu
Posted by scarr at May 20, 2009 05:05 PM