Monument Valley

Anne Markward, David Muench

Description

Welcome to Monument Valley Tribal Park—a world of weather-carved rock and wind-driven sand, of massive buttes painted with dark desert varnish, of hardy plants clinging to the earth. At dawn and sunset, an ever-changing sky silhouettes the dark-looming monuments against washes of color from delicate to vibrant. Monument Valley’s Navajo residents live in harmony with this challenging, beautiful landscape.
Dynamic forces of earth, wind, and water built and sculpted the dramatic forms of this land. The visible rock of Monument Valley—carved today into buttes, monoliths, and mesas—represents millions of years of contrasting land layers as ancient sands compressed over geologic time into rock. Then the vast Colorado Plateau uplifted, erosion cutting its softer surfaces back down, leaving pockets and markers of hard rock still standing. Grain by grain, wind and rain still carve the rock forms of Monument Valley.
Ancestral Puebloans settled into the recessed rock alcoves dotting this region more than a thousand years ago. Only fragments of their lives—masonry dwellings, hand-formed pottery, rock art—remain. Many generations later, the Diné—the People—established a homeland in the red rock country and a community based on harmonious life between Mother Earth and Father Sky.
Harry Goulding came to Monument Valley with his young wife, Mike, in 1924 to establish a trading post at the foot of Big Rock Door Mesa. They raised sheep, traded handwoven Navajo rugs for food and household items, and hosted an ever-growing number of curious visitors. During the difficult Depression years of the 1930s, the Gouldings attracted early moviemakers to Monument Valley. John Ford’s films created an entire generation of moviegoers’ views of the American West—and travelers from around the world have visited Monument Valley ever since. The Navajo Tribal Council established Monument Valley Tribal Park in 1958. Now this place of traditional lifestyle and spectacular scenery is preserved for its beauty as well as its ancestral and contemporary importance to the Navajo.
Those who travel here find not only the rich history of this desert place, but a sense of Monument Valley’s special harmony as well. Let the rhythm of this land thrum through your soul; let the voice of its spirit call you home.

Sujets

• Loisirs
• Collections photographiques
• Photographie Créative
• Monuments
• Landscapes
• Themes
• Subjects
• Colorado Plateau
• Western United States
• Southwestern United States
• Navajo Nation
• Photography
• Navajo
• Monument Valley
• Arizona
• Utah

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 26 mai 2015
• Nombre de lectures: 13
• EAN13: 9780944197028
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 4 Mo

Extrait

SLICKROCK RAIN POOL ON CEDAR MESA

MONUMENT VALLEY DOUBLE EXPOSURE
M ONUMENT V ALLEY
NAVAJO NATION NATURAL WONDER

BREAK OF DAWN
Photography by David Muench

Essay by Anne Markward
DAYBREAK, MITTEN ROCK AND MERRICK BUTTE
A Companion Press Series book
All photographs by David Muench, unless otherwise credited. www.davidmuenchphotography.com
Text 1992, 2015 by Anne Markward.
Historical images from the Goulding s, Museum Collection, Monument Valley, Utah, used with permission.
Red 2015 (p. 40) and untitled: I walk in beauty that . . . 2015 (p. 84) by Esther G. Belin, reprinted with permission. www.bitterwater.weebly.com
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored, introduced into a retrieval system, or copied in any way without permission in writing from the publisher.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2015930304
ISBN 978-0-944197-01-1
Graphic Arts Books
An imprint of

P.O. Box 56118 Portland, OR 97238-6118 [phone] www.graphicartsbooks.com
Produced with care by Collaborative Publishing Services Bozeman, Montana Jane Freeburg, Editor/Designer www.collaborativepublishingservices.com
Printed in China
Contents
Preface
David Muench
Rhythms of the Land:
AN INTERPRETIVE ESSAY Anne Markward
Monument Valley :
A PHOTOGRAPHIC COLLECTION David Muench
ABOUT THE IMAGES
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

MOTHER AND DAUGHTER BELOW EAR OF THE WIND

EVENING BUTTES

ICONIC BUTTES AFTER PASSING STORM
Preface
Several years ago my wife, Ruth, and I visited Goulding s Trading Post Museum in Monument Valley. I wanted to show her the place I had known as Harry and Mike Goulding s home, a place that offered me entrance into the astonishing world of Monument Valley.
It was a warm, inviting home. The Gouldings, who had come to Monument Valley as traders in 1924, became a vital part of the Navajo community in which they lived. In welcoming my parents and me into their world, they provided the small child I was with what I now understand as among the most powerful of my formative experiences.
The friendship my photographer father and writer mother shared with the Gouldings ensured my parents traveled often to Monument Valley. My parents passion for the landscape, and the people who lived in it, deeply influenced me. And the world the Gouldings laid before me was enthralling. As I grew older, I sometimes traveled the area with Harry when he went to visit Navajo families and old friends, or toured with him and Navajo guides as he drove his jeep to areas he d heard about but hadn t seen. Unconsciously, I was connecting with the great Navajo homeland. While I was taking it in as a boy, beginning to see it as the photographer I would become, I don t think I missed much of it. The monolithic forms of rock, the ever-changing light, the play of sand and sky and time in this ancient, wind-carved land all drew me deeper and deeper. The dramatic rock formations began a whole way of seeing the landscape, while connection with this landscape slowly infused my whole creative spirit. My visual thinking grew as my emotional immersion deepened in continuing visits to the valley. The light surrounding the valley s buttes and mesas spoke to me.
When I finally began photographing here, it was intuitive. I was photographing the landscape, of course, but I was really photographing what I was feeling . Respect grows as you learn the life of a people different from yourself. Art grows when you begin to work with the wonders of nature. Put it all together and you begin to feel a landscape through the history of its people as much as through its natural evolution. Through all that is ancient, timeless, exactly right, you begin to understand.
For me, Monument Valley is the place where earth and sky join in harmony and beauty. In my photographs I am responding to the immense landscape of red rock monoliths beneath the pristine dome of sky. From the beginning, the great rock shapes, colors, and textures made a profound impression on my photographic sensibilities. As I became more and more immersed in photographing here, subtler things-the details of cactus and yucca blooms, the spreads of wildflowers, ripples in sand-all spurred my creative juices. I needed to bring the minute detail in the close foreground together with the distant and infinite grand landscape. (This became what I call Natural Connections , or near-far in photographic terms.) Monument Valley became a timeless landscape for me. I wanted to capture the profound moments, the moments signifying change, those moments of fleeting light, captured and gone. (I now call these Timeless Moments , the instant in which the past meets the future, that instant that is the Now.)
Before the Navajo arrived in this place, Ancient Puebloans had already left images in stone in various remote (to us) locations. Harry Goulding first showed me some of these, as well as ruins of Ancient Puebloan homes, but I made the photographs of petroglyphs and pictographs included in this book in more recent years, accompanied by Navajo guides. I m fascinated by using the modern form of a photograph to capture the thousands of years speaking to us on rock, and equally enthralled by the prehistoric architecture of cliff dwellings, and other ruins, staring out through time, blending with the drama of light and shadow on sandstone walls.
Ruth and I had ridden through the valley before coming into the Museum, the erstwhile house where I had begun to learn what mattered in the world of nature, of wonder, of beauty. Outside, we had been present to many of the rock formations I have so often photographed. But now, inside that building, I stood surrounded by Memory. In the Josef Muench room (Harry had caught film director John Ford s attention with these images) I felt myself inside my father s photographs on the walls, inside the domestic world of the Gouldings. It flooded over me, and I cried. I suppose it s one of the ways we let go so that we can go on. Immersed in this place so vital to my childhood, I have visited often since my own career as a photographer began. The Gouldings and my parents have been gone a long time. But the land remains.
And I celebrate it with my photography. I celebrate the beauty, the pristine landscape, the ancient homeland of the Navajo People.


LAST LIGHT FROM HUNT S MESA

MANY BUTTES

WINTER S WINDOW
Rhythms of the Land
Monument Valley s iconic rock formations may appear timeless. But the eternal is not static; the valley is changing-albeit by mere millimeters-with every season. Dynamic forces of the earth, wind, and water built and sculpted the dynamic forms of this land. The visible rock of Monument Valley, carved today into buttes, monoliths, and mesas, represents millions of years of contrasting landscapes: a sea-level assortment of low-lying hills, riverbanks, and estuaries overlaid by massive sand dunes blown in from the ancestral Rockies and then once more coursed over by streams.