The Graces: A Century-Long Conversation with Laura Gilpin

The Graces: A Century-Long Conversation with Laura Gilpin

There is a particular kind of silence that settles over the Garden of the Gods when the fog moves in low against the ancient sandstone rock formations. The color fades, going soft and pale, the world narrowing to just one formation with fog as a backdrop. One September, I went looking for that silence on purpose. Long before I made The Graces, I knew Laura Gilpin’s Ghost Rock. I’d been retracing her footsteps as a female photographer, wandering through the same sacred space.

At the opening of Through the Lens: Photography Across Colorado, I met the historian and curator Rupert Jenkins. Upon our introduction, he mentioned that my image, The Graces, was very similar to Laura Gilpin’s Ghost Rock. He’d read it exactly right, and there was something satisfying in that; he was the first person to notice. This was confirmation that the conversation I’d set out to have with Gilpin a century later finally landed, that it was legible to someone who knows her work well. Rupert is the author of Outside Influence: Photography in Colorado, 1945–1995, a history of the state’s postwar photographic community published by the University Press of Colorado.

Who Gilpin Was, and What She Made Here

Laura Gilpin trained in New York at the Clarence H. White School of Photography, absorbing the Photo-Secession’s belief that a photograph could carry mood the way a painting does, that it didn’t owe the world documentation so much as feeling. In 1918 she came home to Colorado Springs. The following year, in the Garden of the Gods, she made Ghost Rock, her celebrated image of the rock formations rising pale and vertical into a soft, undefined sky. Printed in platinum, the tonal range reads as interpretation rather than record. It was one of her first real successes, the opening note of a career that would carry her across the Southwest for the next six decades.

What strikes me most, looking at Ghost Rock now, is what she left out. No horizon to orient you. No human figure for scale. Just the red rock formations, allowed to be the whole subject, photographed like a portrait.

Making My Image

The Graces comes from a formation among those same ancient rocks, sandstone older than the Rocky Mountains rising behind it, referred to as the ancestral mountains. I chose a different spire grouping, known as the Three Graces, working in infrared at 720nm, whereas Gilpin had platinum’s slow, silvery gradations. My image has a different kind of alchemy, the unexpected results of infrared in the fog, a glow and softness entirely its own. Different tools, a hundred years apart, chosen on purpose to carry the same underlying intent, to make stone feel less like geology and more like mysterious presence.

Coming Home to the Same Ancestral Mountains 

Gilpin was one of the very few women pursuing landscape photography seriously at that time. Interestingly, her return to Colorado Springs in 1918 echoes my own return to Colorado in 2009. We both moved away to study photography, but also returned to the West to pursue our artistic vision. Upon returning home, we were both inspired by the landscapes of our childhood, creating separate and unique bodies of work that would define each of us.

My own return has a childhood in it too. As a child, my parents would drive down to Garden of the Gods for family picnics, back when the park was far less known than it is now. Photographing this landscape has been a reconnection to those memories, and to the place itself, layered now with everything I’ve since learned to see in it.

Gilpin later recalled, “There was practically no art interest in Colorado Springs in those early days. I remember Harvey Young was the only painter in town, and I don’t think there was a sculptor. I knew nothing about sculpture.”

Gilpin’s Colorado Springs was the beginning of her life’s work. Mine has been a deliberate return to the same familiar land, a landscape I knew first as a child and later sought out on purpose, with her example in mind.

A Company of Two, Across a Century

I don’t think tribute is quite the right word, though I’ve claimed it since. It isn’t imitation. It’s closer to call and response, the kind of conversation you can have with an artist you never met, using the same landscape as the only shared language you need. Gilpin photographed Ghost Rock in platinum, chasing mood over description, at the start of a lifetime spent honoring the Southwest. A hundred years later I photographed The Graces in infrared, chasing the same thing, at a point in my own life when honoring this land, and what it might tell me about my ancestors, has become the whole of my work.

Some ground asks to be photographed more than once. I went to Gilpin’s landscape knowing exactly whose shoulder I was standing on, and I’m grateful the fog met me there that day, as did her spirit.