Image Title: Spanish Rider, Canyon de Chelly, Arizona
Image Size: 15x19 inches on 17x21-inch paper
Created: 2000
Medium: Pigment Ink Print

About The Work

For decades now I have taken every opportunity to visit rock art sites. I find their linkage to the past and their resonance with the present very powerful. In the photograph Spanish Rider, the Navaho pictograph documents a Spanish priest entering Canyon de Chelly. It may have been the first time the artist saw a horse, let alone a Catholic priest, but it certainly records a point in history where there was seminal change occurring. I made the picture with an 8x10 view camera, which allowed me to stand at a distance so the majesty of the sandstone walls can be seen while still recording a clear rendering of the rock art. If the picture is about time, not only is it historical time, but geological as well.

About the Artist

Linda Connor has had a long and distinguished career in photography and has traveled extensively, nationally and internationally, to produce her work, including India, Turkey, Peru, Iceland, and South East Asia. Since the late 1960's, she has been teaching in the Photography Department at the San Francisco Art Institute and exhibiting, publishing, and teaching nationally and internationally. In 2002, she founded PhotoAlliance, a bay area non-profit organization dedicated to the understanding, appreciation and creation of contemporary photography, and currently serves as its president.

A compendium of her work, Odyssey: The Photographs of Linda Connor, was published in 2008. This monograph includes over thirty years of photographs and is accompanied by a nationally- traveling exhibition. Her work has appeared in a number of other monographs: Solos, On the Music of the Spheres, Luminance, Odds n Ends, and Spiritual Journey (the latter of which was published for a mid-career retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Photography in Chicago). A recipient of, among other awards, National Endowment for the Arts grants and a Guggenheim fellowship, Connor was given the Society of Photographic Education's Honored Educator Award in 2005.