Ghost Ranch: land of Light - A collaborative project with Janet Russek

Our introduction to Ghost Ranch, New Mexico started as a literary one, far from the southwest in our birth city of Brooklyn, New York, through books containing letters exchanged by Georgia O’Keeffe, Alfred Stieglitz and Ansel Adams. Stieglitz had never traveled to the Southwest himself.  O’Keeffe and Adams would correspond sending him detailed descriptions of the land as well as their visual interpretations.  Stieglitz was able to “feel” the West through their writings. 

In a 1937 letter to Alfred Stieglitz, Ansel Adams wrote, 

It is all very beautiful and magical here – a quality which can not be described.  You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake it into you. The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro, where everything is sidewise under you and over you, and the clocks stopped long ago.
Ansel Adams


In a letter to Alfred Stieglitz from Ghost Ranch, 9/21/37

O’Keeffe wrote,  

In the evening, with the sun at your back it looks like an ocean, like water.  The color there is different…the blue-green of the sage and the mountains, the wildflowers in bloom.  It's a different kind of color from any I'd ever seen – there's nothing like that in north Texas or even Colorado.  And it's not just the color that attracted me either. The world is so wide up there, so big.
Georgia O'Keeffe
Georgia O'Keeffe, A Lifeby Roxanne Robinson (page 327)


These letters also formed ourfirst impressions of the West; not the West of television and movies, but the West as seen through the eyes of the artist.  We were able, from our urban environment, to create a visual picture of the Southwest for ourselves, and a desire to go to New Mexico. Separately, we visited New Mexico several times and finally moved there (David in 1978 and Janet in 1980). Together, we began exploring our new home.  

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To purchase Ghost Ranch: Land of Light click here