Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby from Craig Varjabedian on Vimeo.
In seven years exploring and backpacking O'Keeffe country Varjabedian retraces the artist's footsteps, reinterpreting Ghost Ranch's iconic scenery in 110 breathtaking black-and-white photographs.
Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby handsomely reproduces [Varjabedian's] black and white photographs that portray the parched New Mexican soil under tumultuous skies that spoke to and so captured Georgia O'Keeffe's creative imagination.
The remarkable photographs by Craig Varjabedian are not only beautiful, but also extremely valuable documents of architecture, culture and lifestyle. From intimate portraits to expansive landscapes, Varjabedian's images, made primarily in black and white, celebrate the drama ad potency inherent in each subject's relationship to the photographer.
Ghost Ranch is perhaps best known as the longtime home of American artist Georgia O'Keeffe, who captured some of the its most stunning scenery in her paintings. For more than twenty years, award-winning, fine art photographer Craig Varjabedian has explored and captured the red cliffs and sweeping plains of this fabled 21,000-acre area in northern New Mexico. In Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby, he shares over 90 new duotone photographs capturing its evanescent light.
These images reach beyond familiar ideas associated with the Ranch — such as its renown as a site of personal renewal and transformation — into Varjabedian's singular vision of his subject and its ties to ideas of identity, place, and perception.
While walking home on a snowy Michigan day in 1970 after taking pictures for his high school newspaper, fourteen-year-old Craig Varjabedian passed by an art gallery. Inside he saw a man with a thick white beard hanging pictures on the wall of a gallery. The teenager was awestruck by images of sky and stone, mountains and rivers, trees and thunderclouds. Seeing the young onlooker, the old man invited him in. Soon they were talking about cameras and photography.
The white-haired man was Ansel Adams; and this chance meeting sealed Varjabedian’s future.
After studying art and photography at the University of Michigan and Rochester Institute of Technology, Varjabedian went to New Mexico to finish his thesis. There, a friend took him to see Ghost Ranch, an inspirational mecca for artists, poets, painters, and photographers, including Ansel Adams, who was a frequent visitor, and Georgia O’Keeffe, who lived and painted there for more than fifty years.
I know exactly how he feels! I had the good fortune to be introduced to the mesmerizing beauty of northern New Mexico as a child, and if I don't get to visit several times a year to soak in its gentle grandeur and recharge my soul, well, let's just say I get a bit cranky. And, because Georgia O'Keeffe lived in and began to develop her unique style near my hometown in the Texas Panhandle, I was introduced to her work through the local museum at a young age.
Growing up in that ocean of land and sky, O'Keeffe's art was not abstract to me in any way - she was just trying to get people to see the beauty - often small, simple and taken for granted - that surrounds us daily.
So, take the time to slow down, breath deeply and see, really see the beauty of Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby.
And if you want to savor some Georgia O'Keeffe at the same time, then you will want the must-have and newly published Georgia O'Keeffe Words l Works, Volume 1, that is in our Art & Photography Collection.
Want to get up close and personal, then also check out Day Hikes in the Santa Fe Area in our Places Collection.
Craig Varjabedian's photographs of the American West illuminate his profound connection with the region and its people. His finely detailed images die with an authenticity that reveals the inseparable ties between identity, place and act of perceiving.
For Varjabedian, the art of photography is a receptive process driven by the openness to the revelation each subject offers, rather than the desire to manipulate form or catalog detail. He achieves this intensely personal vision by capturing and suspending on film those decisive moments in which the elements and the ineffable sprit of a moment come together in exceptional and often startling ways.
"The remarkable photographs by Craig Varjabedian are not only beautiful, but also extremely valuable documents of architecture, culture and lifestyle. From intimate portraits to expansive landscapes, Varjabedian's images, made primarily in black and white, celebrate the drama ad potency inherent in each subject's relationship to the photographer, said Beaumont Newhall, preeminent 20th-century photographic historian and author of History of Photography: 1939 to the Present.
"The one thing that never changes is that moment of recognition when I feel the play of light, shadow, and texture resolve itself into something amazing," Vajabedian explains. Through this process, he offers viewers a new way of seeing — one that transcends mundane perception and expands our awareness of the potential of every moment.
In 1991, he co-produced an Emmy Award-winning film about his work entitled En Divina Luz: The Penitente Morados of New Mexico. Photographs from this book were published in a book by the same name, with an essay by Pulitzer Prize-nominated author Michael Wallis. Other books by Craig Varjabedian include Landscape Dreams: A New Mexico Portrait.