Framedlight

Before we left the UK I had booked tickets for a landscape tour of Georgia O'Keeffe locations at Ghost Ranch. The tour didn't start till lunchtime so we stopped en route and took a short walk, not far from Ghost Ranch, through some red rock countryside. The stark desert landscape was very beautiful.  Georgia O'Keeffe also loved these surroundings. She first visited here in 1929 when she had come down from New York to visit friends in Taos. Ghost Ranch is now a retreat where you can stay and take courses if you wish. In the 30's it was a dude ranch. A place where rich people could come and pretend to be cowboys. It had got its name as it had once belonged to cattle rustlers who had become outlaws and murderers and were hanged for their troubles.  In 1934 O'Keeffe stayed in a cottage in the main area of Ghost Ranch, but she later managed to rent a small property on the outskirts called Rancho de los Burros. O'Keeffe came back every summer and spent her time explor...

In the late afternoon we drove down to Abiquiu. There is a car park below the town and here was a  market that was more or less packing up for the day. We went up a tiny road to the town square which was not metalled and very dusty. The adobe Catholic church, St Thomas the Apostle was presiding over the square and the whole place was deserted and silent in the warm light. All the churches I saw had one of these plaques in the churchyard! There must be some heavy spending behind their installation. Admittedly in New Mexico the majority of churches are Roman Catholic. We stopped by the river on the way home. The cottonwoods were glowing in the light and there was a single angler fishing. The last pictures are views of Georgia O'Keeffe’s 'White Place', where she did a number of paintings. Unfortunately it is on private land and not at the moment open to the public. 200mm was as close as I could get! An interesting mesa close to the road

  We went down to the shore of the reservoir hoping to get close to the water. There is an area advertising itself as a bathing beach and having some changing rooms, toilets and picnic benches. Unhappily all these facilities are made of brutal concrete and ornamented with rusted metal. I am sure in the height of a New Mexico summer any place to get into the water would be good, but they could have made it more pleasant. Driving back towards Abiquiu the road makes a dramatic sweep around a cliff and there is a place to park to take in the view. I crawled underneath the barrier to get a better composition and Alan photographed me  returning!

The house I had rented near Abiquiu was an adobe built small cottage which had been built as a schoolhouse in the 1890's. It had been bought by the owner's great grandfather and been in her family since then. We had decided on Abiquiu because of its Georgia O'Keeffe connection. I had liked her work since going to the large retrospective exhibition at the Tate Modern in 2016. As a photographer I also found her relationship with Stieglitz interesting. The morning dawned sunny if not too warm and we were excited to get out and about. But the van wouldn't start. We phoned the owner, phoned the agency, phoned some sort of mechanical online service but nothing was doing. Eventually the help line brought a mechanic to our door who spent time exploring the van, a manual, and chewing his pen. Many cups of coffee later and after tracing some wiring, he found a switch underneath a skirt on the front of the driver's seat which was a kill switch. Which it had done, very effectiv...