THE HOPI PHOTOGRAPHS Kate Cory: 1905-1912 [SOLD]

THE HOPI PHOTOGRAPHS Kate Cory: 1905-1912 

1988. University of New Mexico Press

From the outside cover:

THIS EXTRAORDINARY COLLECTION OF PHOTOGRAPHS, never before published, was made 80 years ago on the Hopi mesas of northern Arizona by Kate Thompson Cory, a woman out of step with her time. For unknown reasons, Cory was not only befriended by the normally xenophobic Hopi, and given a home in their villages, she was allowed something almost all outsiders have been denied: a look into the heart of Hopi life. The results of that trust are images of social and sacred events unlike anything seen through the eye of a camera.

Kate Cory was born during the Civil War into a prominent Illinois family that counted Abraham Lincoln as one of its friends. After a conventional education in art, she settled into the pleasant, uneventful life well-bred ladies of her generation were expected to lead. Then, in 1905, when she was 44 years old, something happened. She boarded a train bound for the Arizona Territory, and spent the rest of her long eccentric life in the West.

Cory\'s intimacy with the Hopi is apparent in each one of these images. From her portraits, and scenes of daily life, to the exotic rituals that have fascinated visitors for centuries, she captured the Hopi Way, the profoundly spiritual and orderly community that allowed Hopi culture to endure for a thousand years. That she could have achieved such high technical quality is equally remarkable. She became an adept and dextrous photographer at a time when most Americans considered the medium a novelty.

What has been achieved by bringing this collection to light is a record of unarguable historic and aesthetic importance--the capture of moments, as anthropologist Barton Wright says, "frozen in time, when change had not yet overwhelmed the enduring Hopi."