WEBVTT

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There's two challenges.

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One, following this wonderful
set of readings, and two,

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having to talk about
photographs that you haven't

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seen an d trying to evoke them.

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I'll be very brief.

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I'll give you a
little bit of history.

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When I first started
to photograph seriously

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about 25 years ago,
I started quickly

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visiting the various
touchstones of Western landscape

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photography in which Canyon
de Chelly surely is one.

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But very soon after getting
photographed in there,

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I felt that I was taking
something from the land

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rather than expressing
something about it.

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And I felt I needed to
be not only in the land,

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but to try to at least
get to know the people.

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And my wife, Karen, and I spent
two summers teaching at what

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was then Navajo Community
College and now is Diné

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College.

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And using the time in between
teaching math to try to get

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a deeper sense of what Tséyi'
and Tsaile and the county were

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about.

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And what I tried to do with my
images, first to react to it,

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I feel, emotionally, which is a
strong response to the rhythms

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that are imposed by my wife
or that the land revealed

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or what the colors
revealed in the land.

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And so the images, if
you can imagine them,

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are fragments of the canyon.

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We're try to capture those
rhythms to which I respond.

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And I hope that what the
photographs in ensemble capture

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is something approaching the
stories that come from Laura,

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which are, in fact,
fragments which put together

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allow you to [INAUDIBLE]
get a sense of place,

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a feeling for it, and a feeling
for an emotional reaction

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to it.

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If you want to see what the
photographs kind of look like,

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there was a book that I had the
good fortune of collaborating

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on, with Joy Harjo,
called Secrets

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from the Center of the World.

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And some of the
images that appear

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there are at least similar
in many ways to what was--

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what I've tried to do
in Canyon de Chelly.

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But the ones from the canyon
are a little bit different,

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because there's very
different approaches I took.

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And finally comes out about a
year or a year and a half ago.

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I at least hope that the
images match the poetry.

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[APPLAUSE]