LAURA GILPIN, Temple of the Warriors from the Castillo, Chichen Itza Yucatan, Mexico 1932, 6.5x4.6" vintage Gelatin Silver Print ASG# LG/1380 unsigned loose print with stamp verso Photograph by Laura Gilpin Colorado Springs, Colo. ©1932 in pencil. Condition: Excellent verso has linen tape and soiling.

A modestly priced masterpiece of one of Gilpin's iconic images of the Mayan Ruins, here the temple is framed through the Window of the Castillo. In the 1930 she traveled to the Yucatan Peninsula to work with Silvanus Morley and make architectural views of the ruins.

Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) photographed the American Southwest for more than sixty years, creating an extraordinary document of the land and its people. A contemporary of Mary Austin, Willa Cather, and Georgia O'Keeffe, she was unique among the women chroniclers of the Southwest in that photography was her medium of expression.

Gilpin was born on April 22, 1891 in Austin Bluffs, Colorado. After studying photography with Clarence White in New York she returned to Colorado to photograph the place she knew best. Through the early 1930s she produced a series of platinum and silver print masterpieces on textured paper in the pictorial tradition of Alfred Stieglitz, Clarence White, Edward Steichen, Gertrude Kasebier and others. These photographs are exemplary of the finest early twentieth century photo-secession art movement. Beginning in the early 1930s and continuing throughout her life, she made sharper edged images of the Pueblo and Navaho Indians and landscapes of unparalleled beauty of the Southwest. She moved to Santa Fe in the mid 1940s where she resided until her death in 1979. Andrew Smith who grew up in Santa Fe was a friend of Gilpin's in the 1970s, visiting with here and purchasing photographs from her.Her interest in architecture, sculptural form and cultural artifacts inspired three trips to the ruins of Chichen Itza in the Yucatan for which she compiled photographs and wrote an accompanying text for the book, Temples in Yucatan.

Excellent verso has linen tape and soiling.