Photos

The first in a small series of scenes that I think embody something important about the American Southwest - the area of the country that includes New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, Arizona, Nevada and California. On my most recent trip, we went only to two of those states: New Mexico and Colorado.

This scene is from Santa Fe's Canyon Road, the main center for Santa Fe's vibrant artistic community. About two miles long, Canyon Road is lined with art galleries and sculpture gardens almost to the exclusion of any other structure. Many of them feature outdoor work (especially sculpture) and the road itself is a great example of the charming Santa Fe 'look' of adobe houses with bright flowers and brightly painted woodwork. I've included another couple of shots of Canyon Road to the workshop.

The peppers that you can see hanging from this adobe-style house are a frequent decorative item that can be seen regularly in Santa Fe; they are also sold in large numbers of art shops and tourist galleries downtown. They are recreations of methods used to dry hot peppers, by allowing them to hang in the sun; dried hot peppers are a regular entry in Southwest, Tex-Mex or New Mexican cuisine.

The horse is the aspect of the shot I struggled with the most; another verion of this shot cropped it out entirely and focused only on the upper third of this shot, as the horse doesn't have the same angled lighting as the rest of the shot, making it appear too dark. However, as the horse is a critical aspect of the Southwest, it seemed more necessary to include it here.