Glass plates & wagon ruts

the long version

In the early years of this century, William Pennington and Lisle Updike roamed the Four Corners area of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona, photographing people and landscapes. They traveled on horseback, by narrow gauge railroad, horse-drawn wagon, or Model T Fords, sometimes working together from the studio they shared in Durango, sometimes working alone. They went to mining camps in the nearby San Juan Mountains as well as to the Navajo, Jicarilla, Apache, Acoma, and Zuni Indian reservations. What they preserved in their photographs takes the viewer back to a vanished era, but exquisitely preserves a sense of both time and place. Now, for the first time, H. Jackson Clark has collected the entire corpus of Pennington and Updike's wonderful images in Glass Plates & Wagon Ruts. Taken together, these photographs - highly valued and eager sought by collectors - are a provocative visual record of the Southwest that is of interest to anyone who loves this beautiful country and its colorful past.