Photographing Navajos

In the summer of 1952, John Collier Jr. and his family pitched their tents in the cottonwood trees along the San Juan River behind the Fruitland Trading Post. Collier had come to New Mexico’s Navajo country as a photographer for a Cornell University anthropology project. …

Collier’s job was to find “systematic ways of getting knowledge out of pictures” of Navajos for the team’s anthropologists to use. Nearly 1,000 Collier photographs still exist from this project. Until now, fewer than thirty-five of them have been published. Yet at least two hundred of these images are among the finest photographs ever taken of the Navajo people. They show the shift from the traditional pastoral Navajo life of raising sheep and weaving wool to cash-crop agriculture, urban wage work, and a closer connection to the rest of the world.

—C. Stewart Doty, in Photographing Navajos

New in 2002 from the University of New Mexico Press, Photographing Navajos is available in Currents Museum Store at the Farmington Museum at Gateway Park for $41.95 with tax plus $6.50 shipping and handling. Call (505) 599-1174 to order.