NMSU Library permanently houses award-winning photographs featuring White Sands National Park

It’s a vast, dreamy landscape many in the Southwest feel lucky to have in their own backyard. Whether you are sledding down the soft waves of sand, spending time with family and friends, or simply admiring its beauty, White Sands National Park is a sight to see – and you can experience a glimpse of it at New Mexico State University’s Library.

New Mexico State University Archives and Special Collections recently acquired the photographic exhibition called "Into the Great White Sands: Photographs by Craig Varjabedian.” An award-winning photographer, Varjabedian said this project is the result of his decade-long effort to capture the breathtaking beauty and natural elements of White Sands.

“White Sands first became this place that I went to rest and restore when work would become too intense,” Varjabedian said. “For me, the process of deciding on a body of work is really organic. As I look back at it now, when I first went to the Sands in the 1980s, I had yet to fall truly in love with the place. Of course, I thought it was incredibly beautiful, but I didn’t feel particularly compelled to photograph it at first. I came to find out much later that it really is like no other place on earth.”

“While nearly everyone who has visited White Sands has taken photographs, Craig’s eye, enormous talent, and dedication to his long-term goal have produced a collection of images that is truly exceptional,” said Dennis Daily, department head of NMSU Library’s Archives and Special Collections. “We are glad that Craig felt strongly about making sure these images remain in the state of New Mexico and the area where they were produced, where they will be preserved and enjoyed for generations.”

Varjabedian made the trek to White Sands in the early 2010s and was just finishing his third book, “Landscape Dreams: A New Mexico Portrait,” with the University of New Mexico Press. With the encouragement of the Press, he decided that White Sands would be the subject of his next book and so began the journey of revealing the beauty of this incredible landscape through his lens.

“What you see in the book and in the exhibition is a curated selection of images,” he said. “I want to share the beauty of White Sands through my photographs.”

Varjabedian said he would travel back and forth from Santa Fe and Alamogordo, New Mexico about every two weeks to spend about seven days exploring and photographing the magnificent landscape. “I photographed it in all kinds of weather, different times of the year, different times of the day, different seasons – all of it.”

During his quest to photograph this New Mexico treasure, Varjabedian received assistance from the staff of National Park Service at the Park. Their generous help made many of the pictures in the collection possible.

“White Sands is about 275 square miles, so in the beginning I did a lot of hiking,” he said. “There are, however, distant areas in the park that I wasn’t comfortable hiking out alone, particularly during the heat of summer. Fortunately, the National Park Service stepped in and allowed me to accompany them on their ATVs when their work took them out to distant areas within the park.”

Taking these photographs not only allowed the photographer to tap into his creativity and express what he saw, but also exposed him to special moments off camera.

“Not every single moment that I was there was I taking pictures,” he said. “I spent a fair amount of down time sitting and observing. White Sands certainly has this incredibly beautiful tableau of sand, gorgeous shapes, but there’s also this human and even animal component that interacts with it. I wanted better to understand the relationship between this place and the people who go there, each looking for their own experience.”

Once the project wrapped up on the field, Varjabedian assembled all the pieces of the book and created the exhibition of 50 large-scale photographic prints that travelled to several locations in New Mexico and Texas. Since 2020, he has toured the exhibition and participated in book signings for the project. “People who didn’t know about White Sands or had never been there were incredibly moved and amazed at how beautiful it is because of the book and exhibition.”

Now, the entire exhibition of framed photographs from “Into the Great White Sands” has made its way to NMSU Library’s Archives and Special Collections, a safehouse that will preserve Varjabedian’s work and continue to expose it to the community and beyond.

“Craig’s photographs are an important contribution to the visual record of this region,” Daily said. “They help make NMSU a destination for researchers, authors, and publishers from around the world who are interested in the history and cultural heritage of this unique place.”

“I’m a big believer in archives and patronage, and things made staying in the region where they were created,” Varjabedian explained. “The challenge always is when you create art, particularly when you do it on the kind of scale that I did with the exhibition and book, is you travel around with it for a period of time, and then the time comes where it becomes necessary to find a home for it. There was a piece of me that wanted to keep the exhibition photographs together and being able to house the photographs within the area became crucial.”

Overall, the goal of the exhibition is to not only share the beauty of White Sands, but also to inspire other artists to discover Varjabedian’s work. He said he hopes the photographs he captured in "Into the Great White Sands" will serve as a foundation for future generations to build upon, and that his work will provide inspiration for others to continue the exploration of the beauty and natural elements of White Sands.

“The highest compliment I could ever receive is knowing that I informed and inspired someone else to continue the journey,” he said.

You can explore some of Craig Varjabedian’s “Into the Great White Sands” photographs in the Archives and Special Collections department’s Humboldt Casad and Evangeline Smith Mandell Gallery, located on the fourth floor of Branson Library. The book is also available at the NMSU Library.

Daily added that there are plans underway with community partners to present a large exhibition of the photographs in the near future.

For more information, visit https://www.craigvarjabedian.com/into-the-great-white-sands.

writer: Tatiana Favela
source: Dennis Daily

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