Hypo. That’s what my dear wife, This is America!’s famous*** photographer Carol M. Highsmith, calls herself. I call her the Photo Dervish.
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***Before I explain, let me underscore my characterization of her as “famous” by pointing you to the WHAT’S NEW tab, elsewhere on this site.
A promotional visual for the online version of the “CBS Sunday Morning” show, showing one of Carol’s images.
It tells you all about Carol’s featured role in this morning’s [April 28] edition of the CBS news magazine CBS Sunday Morning. It was a spectacular coup, not only for Carol but also for the This is America! Foundation and all that we are up to. Check it out, but do come back to read about Hypo the Dervish!
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When Carol calls herself “Hypo,” she of course means “hyper,” or super-energetic. But “Hypo Highsmith” seems to roll off the tongue. It also sort of fits because of a photographic tie-in, harking to the days when photographers sloshed a chemical solution called “hypo” as a fixer when developing film in the darkroom. Not that she or many other photographers have spent much time working under their “safe lights” since the dawning of the Digital Age.
People who don’t know the woman whom I called “my buzzsaw” in the last post may wonder what a typical day is like, for her and for the two of us when we’re on the road across our land. I write this from sunny, dry Taos, New Mexico, which is a bit of a tangent from our beeline to California to complete Carol’s voluminous study of that state. But it’s one we have long wanted to take, since Carol has come close to, but never actually seen, this old and interesting haven for artists and green-chili cooks. (It is the latter that drew me here.) I’m told there are 80 art galleries or museums in this town of 5,716 people. That’s one for every 714 people, including the chili cooks, who may or may not be into art.
Here’s a fairly typical day, specifically yesterday, in the Photo Dervish’s world:
We awoke at the Los Poblanos Inn, which is also a gorgeous organic farm and what Western Interiors magazine called “a masterpiece of New Mexican Territorial Revival architecture.” If that means “cozy ranch house style with gourmet food,” I can vouch for it. (Lest you think we live the vagabond life exclusively in the lap of luxury, I should point out that yesterday was our treat to ourselves, while Carol bustled about photographing Los Poblanos’s grounds for a landscape-architect client. I write this, however, from an ordinary Hampton Inn whose lobby is in reconstruction shambles, whose “grounds” are ring of asphalt, and whose power was out for a couple of hours overnight.)
Even before she had dressed for the day or had a bite of Los Poblanos’s chef’s exquisite eggs Benedict ─ not to be confused with today’s humdrum McDonald’s sausage, egg, and cheese biscuits ─ Carol was on her “devices,” including her cell phone, iPad, personal Web site, following up on clients’ demands, conferring with a fellow who is working on a site that will sell Highsmith prints, conferring with friend back in Washington who is shipping out copies of our book about the Korean War Veterans Memorial, and posting something on her Facebook page.
This is not Albert, I should point out. It’s a peacock pal of his, whose name we didn’t quite catch. (Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith)
And even as I sat at the breakfast table, ladling homemade raspberry jam onto my sourdough toast, Carol was running about breakfast- and coffee-less, catching the morning light across the fields and ponds and patios, and chasing after Albert.
Albert, I should hastily point out, is a white peacock who loves to strut his stuff, which in the case of a peacock is his fanned-out expanse of plumage. But only when he feels like it and almost never on request.
We could not dawdle, though, because work awaited downtown, at the U.S. District Courthouse.
That sort of work goes back 20 years, during which she has photographed, on commission from the federal General Services Administration, not just courtrooms and interior accents but also spectacular WPA art. WPA, as in the Works Progress Administration relief agency set up by President Roosevelt during the depths of the Great Depression.
This long WPA mural appears above the elevators on the first floor of Albuquerque’s federal district courthouse. (Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith)
Carol has captured WPA art everywhere from an immigration station on the Mexican border to federal building in Missouri to a post office in northernmost Maine. Much of it depicts regional history, and Carol says the Albuquerque art was a stunning representation of New Mexico’s indigenous people. I wouldn’t know (other than from looking at Carol’s images such as the one to the right). I was sitting in our SUV the whole time, reading the sports section and making sure our photographic equipment did not overheat in the toasty New Mexico sun.
The moment Carol finished we were off on a Disappearing America hunt, meaning a search for sites on their proverbial last legs. We rode, or “tooled,” as Carol would say, the length of Albuquerque’s old Central Avenue, through which Route 66 once wound, with a few tangents when Carol would spy an interesting mural or sign.
In this case, I agree with Carol’s judgment that this mural on a downtown Albuquerque building is catchy indeed. (Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith)
To use today’s vernacular, Carol freaks over murals. She says they are Everyman’s (and woman’s) art, a reflection of our times and culture and of the artist’s passions. She’ll often run ─ run, not amble ─ from one to another up ahead while I maneuver the car into a crevice, waiting for her. She has her own eye for what’s intriguing on these walls, of course, and it’s often a different one from mine. That, of course, is why she’s the visual artist and I’m a writer guy. She runs, rather than walks, out of sheer surprise that somehow parked cars, construction cranes, or winos drinking from bottles in little brown bags have not yet encumbered her shot.
In Albuquerque, Carol also feasted, visually, on old motels that we reckoned had been in business when Central Avenue was the only way through town, and on various mosaics and church facades and old drive-ins that evoked the American Southwest. And she took a moment to recapture, through her lens, the exterior of the distinctive KiMo Theatre, an old movie palace that had adopted an Indian motif. Years ago, she had photographed it inside and out, including a shot of its spooky cow skulls with illuminated eye sockets, for our first book of national scope. Undertaken for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, America Restored (Preservation Press, 1994) took us to two interesting restoration projects in each of the 50 states.
Deciding what and what not to photograph as we scoot about the land, Carol says she uses several almost instinctual criteria:
the site’s importance, today or historically
its artistic appeal
the light or shadows of the moment
and its “character,” Carol’s inscrutable term for something special that catches her eye.
Occasionally she’ll even snap a scene that I glimpsed as we’re rolling along, though I wouldn’t get rich if you gave me a nickel for each one that made the final archive.
I am adept, though, at pointing to my watch when it’s time for us to move along. Carol admits that if she did the driving, she’d still be in Salina when we were due in Salida. Salina is in Kansas, in case you slept through geography, and Salida is in California.
So we were finally off on what was pegged as a three-hour trip up to Taos. Of course, it was not Carol M. Highsmith who had provided those calculations. The day was already seven hours old, and it would be another seven before we reached Taos.
That’s because we had to dip into Santa Fe, New Mexico’s capital, which we’d only brushed on our many previous zips across country.
To be frank, Santa Fe is not our cup of tea. Too much faux adobe, too many shoppists (my contraction of “shoppers” and “tourists”), not enough antiquity saved, and a tad too much pretention.
So where’s the dome? Or the statues? Or columns? Or some other recognizable state-capitol feature? (Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith)
Twice, or was it three times, we circled the New Mexico Capitol, mistaking it for a big, Southwesty-looking office building. The only clue was the big flagpole on the roof.
Then it was lunch on the run. No chef at this time, unless you’d lump an Arby’s fry cook in that category.
And off we went for Taos.
Not directly to it, of course. Rarely do we go directly anywhere.
We wanted to take the advice of Maren Stockhoff, a young friend of a young friend, and check out New Mexico’s “tent rocks” somewhat on the way.
The Kasha-Katuwe Tent Rocks, which are white cliffs pocked with interesting conical formations, rise along a series of winding roads off to the west, in an obscure U.S. national park on Cochiti Tribal land.
The only thing close to these formations that Carol and I have seen are the “hoodoos” in Utah’s Bryce Canyon National Park. (Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith)
Judge for yourself from Carol’s adjacent photograph, but we thought the detour well worth it.
Then it was back on State Route 76, the “high road to Taos,” punctuated by screeches to a halt so that Carol could photograph New Mexico’s high country, teeny towns, grim shacks and ranch buildings in this fairly impoverished corner of our land, gorgeous “puffies,” as Carol calls billowing cumulous clouds, and cattle and horses that had been minding their own business.
Carol has some sort of magnetic attraction to cows, in particular, but she just says they add “scale” to a scene.
By now we were fighting the dipping sun in the western sky, hoping to reach another New Mexico site from our America Restored travel days in daylight.
Carol wanted one more chance to shoot the old, adobe Church of San Jose de Gracia in a dot of a place called Las Trampas (“the Trap,”), so small that you won’t find it on most maps.
The mud walls and adobe structure of the San José de Gracia church, built from 1760 to 1776, are restored periodically by parishioners. (Photograph by Carol M. Highsmith.)
We made it just as the last rays of the day were reaching the lovely old church, though you couldn’t tell it from Carol’s lovely photo (right) I can’t tell you how many times we’ve arrived at a place in what looks like the evening gloaming, only to have Carol catch an image that looks sparkling bright.
And then it was on to Taos at last, which I can’t tell you a thing about. We were late and tired, and today so far has been spent watching and reacting to the CBS show, and to more computer work by Carol and blogging by me.
So Hypo hasn’t been so hyper today. But there are three or four hours left in the day, the town plaza is just ten minutes away, and, on the way to grab coffee this morning, I saw a mural that Carol will love.
That’ll get the Photo Dervish going.
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