Four Corners

FOUR CORNERS BY DEBRA BLOOMFIELD UNIVERSITY OF NEW MEXICO PRESS, 2004 151 PAGES, $45.00

The old saw has it that "A picture is worth a thousand words." This collection of photographs of our scenic American Southwest bears out that truism. This cocktail table book is not the usual variety. Four Corners has a marvelous historical introduction that sets the scene for the incredibly beautiful and haunting photographs that follow.

Artists such as Georgia O'Keeffe, and photographers such as Ansel Adams have flocked to this region, as the dry atmosphere, changing light conditions, and desert starkness all are grist for the creator's mill. Intellectuals once gathered at O'Keeffe's Ghost Ranch. Director John Ford filmed many of his John Wayne westerns in northeast Arizona, captivating millions of motion picture viewers with his shots of Shiprock on the Navajo Reservation, and the various mesas and buttes of Monument Valley. In fact, for many tourists, he helped put the Southwest on the map.

To Easterners, Four Corners may seem a strange title for a book of photographs. The name is a description of four huge states converging at one geographic point. Arizona, Utah, New Mexico, and Colorado all join borders. Tourists enjoy getting on their hands and knees at that point, boasting how they were in four states at once. (Maryland, Virginia, and West Virginia also converge, but there is no other area in the U.S. that matches Four Corners.) These four-corner states contain a wealth of national parks and monuments and are ripe with Spanish, Mexican, Native American, and U.S. history. The Spanish provincial capital, Santa Fe, with its Governor's Palace, was established before the U.S. was a nation.

Much of the land is part of the geological formation known as the Colorado Plateau. Here, one can find Colorado's world famous Mesa Verde with its cliff dwellings that date back nearly 2,000 years. Around the 13th century, its inhabitants abandoned this venue and scholars still are not sure why. Chaco Canyon, with its 1,000-foot canyon walls, served as a redoubt for the Navajos when Kit Carson was ordered to bring them to Bosque Redondo in New Mexico. It also was a meeting point between Indians from Mexico and those of this country. Acoma, or Sky City, built on a high mesa, resisted the Conquistadors who could not believe that Native Americans could be so tenacious in defense of their dwelling place.

A number of the tribes eked out a living in the Four Corners area. Among them are the Navejo, Utes, Zuni, and various bands of Apaches. Spanish explorers sought the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola, mistakenly thought to have treasures of gold and silver, but which possessed only poor broken-down pueblos. Mountainmen traversed the area, many starting out from Taos. The explorer John Charles Fremont trekked through the Sangra de Christo Mountains and the Great Sand Dunes of Colorado to survey for a transcontinental railroad. The Mormons established their Desert by the Great Salt Lake and spread out from there.

In contemporary times, the city of Los Alamos was created and staffed by some of the brightest scientists in the world, all working together to invent and implode the atom bomb at White Sands, both in New Mexico.

Four Corners is a unique part of our country and each year thousands of tourists from all over the world come to visit its wonders. All of them shoot rolls and rolls of film or ply their skills on digital cameras, but the results can't hold a candle to the photography in this book. Debra Bloomfield, its author, has spent three decades at her craft, and shares her art and techniques with students at the San Francisco Art Institute. When you browse through these photographs of the American Southwest's culture and physical features, though, be forewarned: these images will nag you to journey to this great land of raw beauty.

COPYRIGHT 2004 Society for the Advancement of Education
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group