Juniper Post Fence, New Mexico

> Dorothea Lange was not the first photographer to travel to New Mexico. John K. Hillers photographed in New Mexico for the Bureau of American Ethnology in 1879. He was followed by other nineteenth-century photographers who were interested in the history and current practices of Native Americans in the territory (not proclaimed a state until 1912). The Los Angeles-based writer and publisher Charles Lummis visited in the 1880s, Adam Clark Vroman in 1895, and Edward S. Curtis began his massive survey there in 1903. After the 1916 arrival of the wealthy arts patron Mabel Dodge Luhan, the Taos-Santa Fe region became the destination of many American artists, writers, composers and choreographers. Additionally, Taos again became a site of inspiration for talented photographers. Paul Strand worked out of one of Luhan's studios in 1926 and again in the summers of 1930-32; Ansel Adams visited in 1927 and returned in 1929 for a three-month stay. > > At Luhan's invitation, the British author D. H. Lawrence and his wife, Frieda, came to stay in the 1920s, bringing their countryman Aldous Huxley along on one visit. Huxley's *Brave New World* (1931) featured a "savage" who must choose between his reservation and an urban utopia engineered by science. Lange and Dixon faced a not-so-different choice and decided to leave San Francisco as the depression worsened. Luhan offered Dixon a studio for painting; he knew and liked the region, having first visited in 1900 at the urging of Lummis. Lange later described their flight from a world "in smithereens": "The world was full of uncertainty, and unrest, and trouble, and we got in [the] car and went" (*The Thunderbird Remembered*, 1994). This seven-month sojourn was a productive time for Dixon. Lange, without a studio and her regular clientele, cared for the house and children. She did, however, make some pictures—of adobe structures, young Taos women, and fence posts—that challenged her previous pictorialist style and restricted bourgeois subject matter. Her camera seemed to capture everything but the spectacular landscapes that attracted Strand ([86.XM.683.63](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/54887) and 86.XM.683.102.2) and Adams ([85.XM.198](http://www.getty.edu/art/collection/objects/55708)). Judith Keller, *Dorothea Lange,* In Focus: Photographs from the J. Paul Getty Museum (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2002), 16. © 2002 J. Paul Getty Trust.