Covering Indian Country Blog

Storytelling through Images, Words

From the graceful line of Eagle Dancers to the exquisitely-lined faces of elderly villagers, the images of Pueblo Indians in New Mexico has been captured through the lens of Lee Marmon for more than a half-century.

Marmon, who was born on the Laguna reservation in 1925, chronicles the last generation of the Laguna and Acoma tribes living by their traditional ways and values in his book “The Pueblo Imagination.”

The book, published in 2003 by Beacon Press in Boston, features tribal photographs and landscape images with native poetry by Joy Harjo and Simon Ortiz and poetry and prose by Leslie Marmon Silko, the photographer’s daughter.

The power of words is enhanced by the images, in both color and black-and-white.  The images also stand on their own.

“Storytelling can be told in photographs,” said Marmon who still lives in the Laguna Pueblo. 

“There’s an old saying that a picture is worth a thousand words,” he added. “Instead of trying to describe things in very minute detail, you can see it.”

Marmon, whose work has been shown in New York galleries, now has a web site to promote his work at http://www.leemarmongallery.com.

It’s a long way from his beginnings as a photographer taking pictures of people in the pueblo while delivering groceries in his pickup truck.  “That’s how I got some of my best stuff,” he said. 

The Native American photographer will talk about his images, the stories behind them and the challenges of journalists taking photographs in native cultures during a session Thursday with the Western Knight Fellows in Acoma.

Posted on 03.10.05 at 4:01 AM by Victor Merina