Before I actually went there, I knew nothing about the town of Gallup in New Mexico. I was familiar with a Robert Frank photograph of a sombre Navajo cowboy, taken surreptitiously in a bar there in the 1950s that was published in his classic book The Americans. The picture stayed with me. The place did not. But I decided to go there because of an exchange I had with my father in 1966. His mother had recently died and the whole family had gathered in Tucson in the house of an uncle. I hadn’t seen my father for three years. It was the Fourth of July. I remember some desultory conversation about the holiday, before my father, who had a penchant for making abrupt sotto voce pronouncements, offered an opinion about our treatment of North American Indigenous people. His tone wasn’t argumentative. His words just hung there and drifted away. He died later that day in a tragic and sudden accident, so we never got a chance to pursue the discussion. More than a decade later, my wife Susan – a painter – and I secured funding to produce some work. Thinking of my father and of Robert Frank’s Navajo cowboy, we chose to do so in Gallup.
At first glance, the town seemed like the edge of the world, with an upside-down exotic appeal. Of course, it was not that at all, as we gradually realised. It was layered. It was an in-between place, where people from different cultures collided with each other, often struggling to maintain their identities and not be overwhelmed by other people’s assumptions about who they were. Sometimes it seems as if the world has become increasingly consumed by this battle, but it’s a very old story.
