Red White and Blue and God Bless You:
A portrait of northern New Mexico

Look south over high mountain desert through a frame of glass and chrome. In the distance to the east are the Sangre de Cristo Mountains that form the continental divi de in northern New Mexico. Ben Vigil owns the '52 Chevy. His ancestors claimed this region twenty years before the pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. As meticulously as Ben and his contemporaries restore and care for their cars, his parent's and grandp arent's generation tends their farms and homes.

In 1972, I made my home in northern New Mexico, renting a two-room adobe house in an Hispanic village high in the Sangre de Cristo mountains. I was one year out of college and just beginning my second education. I came to this high country at the invitation of the physician and writer, Robert Coles, to make protraits for a book about ancianos, the old ones of New Mexico. After the book was published, I continued to visit and photograph my neighbors . I bought land and built a home in one of the mountain villages.

For two decades I have worked on a portrait of northern New Mexico -- one I hope rings true. For a number of years I made traditional black-and-white portraits in which my subject's expression and posture at the instant of exposure defined and fixed the meaning of the image at that moment. In 1980, with a view camera and color film, I began the series exhibited here, portraits in which I tried to capture a sense of the presence o f people over time. I photographed family homes, rooms, and fields, objects that individual villagers had made, touched, and used. In these portraits, no people appear.

In 1984, I visited and photographed the home of an old carpenter named Amadeo S andoval. Above the blue doorway between his kitchen and bedroom Amadeo had inscribed the phrase that became the title of this exhibition: Red White Blue and God Bless You. Practically every room I have photographed in northern New Mexico contains some of the feeling of Amadeo's rooms, shows how religion is part of daily life, tells the story of human devotion to home.

©Alex Harris

For me the photo graphs in this exhibit also tell another kind of story. They hint at the luck and fate that twenty years ago led a young man with a camera into northern New Mexico. I lived in that world until I became part of the story I was trying to tell. Something has been given to me over the years. Now, in a different form, I am trying to give something back." -- Alex Harris

---