Main Pueblo Ruins at Wupatki National Monument ~ Winter 2010
Photographs now speak in an eloquent way about the nature of vision itself. The philosophical implications of sight, of being able to see the world in three-dimensional terms, becomes very important within the context of the artistic photograph. The riddle of space and time is somehow stated with a little bit more clarity by virtue of seeing in-between the heartbeats.
Ralph Gibson
The ruins at Wupatki are a but a trace of a thriving culture living on the Colorado Plateau as little as 800 years ago. This photograph of the ruins re-presents both an artifact of the existence of these ruins in 2010 as an image sliced from time and frozen in two dimensions and a trace of my seeing of the ruins on a particular day at a particular moment in four dimensional time and made available for others to see how I see.
The first time I saw these ruins, now over 40 years ago, I was a graduate student in history with an interest in the clash of cultures along the Spanish Borderlands. My sympathies rested with the Native populations as resistors to Spanish domination. At Wupatki, an amazingly intricate pueblo, I reasoned that one could not be anything but impressed by the accomplishments of the builders of this pueblo. Not much is known about the people populating these rooms. They are referred to as either the Anasazi (ancient ones in Navajo) or the Sinagua. More likely, the pueblo represents a melding of several cultures…but there the trail ends. All that remains are these ruins and some pottery shards and at least one photographic image (of course there are many, many more). Over the years I never pass up the chance to visit these ruins or this rich volcanic soil just outside of Flagstaff, Arizona.
Over the past 40 years, I managed to carve out perhaps ten days, some 240 hours visiting this place. I managed to capture around 30 images, half of which were lost in a basement flood. All told, I have a living record of Wupatki of 15 images, a record amounting to 0.06 seconds (0.12 seconds if I include the lost images and their negatives). Seeing the world between heartbeats is a metaphor that captures the essence of the nature of the photographic image. The camera is a tool that allows me to focus my gaze on that which is of interest and, in the final analysis, lets me capture the briefest slices of time to re-present a trace or two of my visual memory for sharing with others.
The Main Pueblo Ruins at Wupatki National Monument ~ Winter 2010 by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
