State of Enchantment
April 24, 2016 – Farmington, New Mexico, USA
Jasmine Ortega sped across the bridge spanning the San Juan river, eager to put her hometown behind her and get back to Albuquerque. Her friend, Clara, was not is such a hurry and suggested they pull over and admire the view of Farmington from the sandstone bluffs overlooking the river.
“I love how you can tell the path of the water by the strip of green trees in between the tan rocks and dirt,” said Clara, staring intensely out the passenger-side window.
“Uh huh,” muttered Jasmine.
“And check out that rock formation way out there. It kind of looks like a mushroom, the way the flat piece is balanced on the base.”
“Yeah, I’ve seen it.”
“That doesn’t automatically make it amazing.”
“I know, but maybe we can stop for just a second so I can get a shot. I’ll use my telephoto lens.”
“You’ve got enough pictures of rocks and the river. And enough pictures of oil wells and trashy looking trailers parked in the middle of nowhere. None of it’s going to get people excited.”
“Oh, I don’t know,” said Clara. “I think it’s kind of raw. Farmington is a real working town with character, you know. It’s not glamorous, but it’s sincere.”
“Sincere?” repeated Jasmine with a sarcastic laugh. “You sound like you’re talking up some guy you feel sorry for. It’s like you’re trying to convince me to date him because you’re not really interested.”
Clara replied with her own laugh. “Hey, I’m just trying to give Farmington a chance, even if you won’t.”
“You can give it as many chances as you want. But I can’t see a picture of Farmington winning anything.”
Jasmine and Clara met and became friends because they were both majoring in photography at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. As 3rd year students, they were taking the most notoriously difficult class in their program – Photographic Field Study. All of their assignments involved going into the community and finding interesting subjects. During every class lecture, their professor told them she was looking for photos that were evocative. “I want to feel something. I want an emotional connection to your image,” the professor continually repeated.
Halfway through the semester, the professor decided to change up the final project because of a statewide photo contest being sponsored by the New Mexico Museum of Art. The contest’s theme was “State of Enchantment”, which was a riff on New Mexico’s nickname as the Land of Enchantment. Every student in the Photographic Field Study class had to submit one photo to the contest, in the Young Artist category. The Young Artist winner would receive a paid internship with an art magazine. And even if they did not win, any kind of contest recognition virtually guaranteed a student an A for the class.
Jasmine and Clara had already spent a lot of time exploring Albuquerque with their cameras. When they learned about the contest, they decided to venture out a little farther, hoping to capture places no one else in their class would find. They agreed to spend a weekend in each of their hometowns: Farmington, where Jasmine grew up and Santa Fe, where Clara had spent most of her teenage years.
Clara had never been to Farmington and she pressed hard for it to be the first weekend destination. Jasmine promised it would be disappointing, but as a budding artist, she agreed to keep her mind slightly opened to any surprises.
“Wait, this isn’t the same way we came when we drove up from Albuquerque,” said Clara, trying to get her bearings when the weekend was over and they were leaving Farmington.
“We’re taking a shortcut. It’ll cut off fifteen minutes from the trip,” replied Jasmine.
“This is the less scenic way, isn’t it?” said Clara suspiciously.
“Well, maybe. It’s mostly wasteland. But you haven’t seen it before. So that’s good, right? And we’ll drive past some farms you might like.”
Almost immediately after they had climbed up to the flat plateau above Farmington, the scenery on both sides of the road turned from an arid gray into green. Fresh shoots of corn and soybeans grew from soil being irrigated by sprinklers rotating around massive circles.
“Whoa. What’s this?” asked Clara.
“A big irritation project by the Navajo tribe. They get the water from the river.”
“Let’s stop and look at the sprinklers.”
“They’re the same sprinklers used all over the place. They aren’t that interesting.”
“At least slow down,” insisted Clara. She pulled out her camera and rolled down her window. She took rapid fire shots of the bursts of spray creating rainbows in the sunlight.
Five miles from Farmington, the road split and Jasmine turned on her blinker to turn left. A sign next to the road pointed straight ahead and read “Bisti Badlands.”
“Bisti Badlands? Now that sounds interesting,” said Clara.
“It’s not. Just more rocks.”
“How far is it?”
“It’s out of the way.”
“By how much?”
“Like thirty minutes. Maybe more. Let’s just go back to Albuquerque.”
“No. Please, let’s go to the Badlands. I didn’t make you stop at the sprinklers. And I promise when we go to Santa Fe, we’ll do anything you want.”
Jasmine moaned, but she drove straight instead of turning left. “You better get out your phone and look at a map,” she said to Clara. “The turnoff to this place is hard to find and I haven’t been here for a while.”
Clara pulled up a map and tracked their progress as they left behind the irrigated fields. The scenery around the highway quickly changed into lifeless hills of brown and gray clay. Rock pillars randomly grew from the ground, looking like stalagmites on the floor of a cave.
“Told you there was nothing out here,” said Jasmine.
“I think it’s cool,” replied Clara. “The turn’s coming up on the left.”
Jasmine complained about ruining her little sedan when she reached the rough gravel road which intersected the paved highway. Clara encouraged her by looking at her phone and repeating, “Only a little farther.”
The road ended at an empty, dirt parking lot. Clara grabbed her camera and jumped from the car. Jasmine reluctantly followed her toward an opening in a barbed wire fence that marked the boundary of the Bisti Wilderness Area.
“You’re not bringing your camera?” asked Clara.
“I’ve got enough rock pictures. And it looks like it’s going to rain. I’m not going to ruin my camera for this if we get caught in a crazy cloudburst.”
“Then let’s hurry,” said Clara.
She jogged through the fence opening and followed a faint trail in the cracked, gray topsoil. Sprinkled over the landscape were lines of black gravel which looked like paintbrush strokes on a dull canvas. After a quarter of a mile, Clara circled a low hill and found the entrance to a rocky labyrinth. Natural erosion had sculpted pillars, wall, and towers in the clay and sandstone. Clara ripped the lens cap from her camera and snapped shots as she rotated 360 degrees. She walked farther into the rocky maze and discovered monoliths that rose from black bases to tips that were almost white. The first raindrops fell on Clara’s head.
“You better hurry,” said Jasmine, who had followed behind her.
Clara pointed her camera up toward the black clouds in the stormy sky and caught a profile lineup of the stone statues. “Pretty enchanting if you ask me,” she said to herself.
The friends made it back to Albuquerque with cameras intact.
Throughout the next week, Jasmine shared a list of places she was hoping to see on their upcoming visit to Santa Fe.
“Maybe we start with the Capitol and the Palace of the Governors,” she said to Clara.
“Really? Those are your first choices? Are you a tourist on a bus trip?” said Clara with a little laugh.
“You said I could choose. Remember how I ruined my car driving out to Bisti for you.”
“I know, I know. We’ll do anything you want. I just thought you’d be less cliché than picking the Capitol. Maybe you’d want to check out the opera house or a painters’ commune.”
Jasmine shrugged her shoulders at being called cliché. “As long as we start at the Capitol,” she said.
That Saturday, they drove Clara’s mini-SUV up the Interstate to Santa Fe. As planned, their first stop was right downtown at the State Capitol building. They parked next to school buses from Bernalillo. A hundred middle-school kids were making the same weekend visit. Clara bit her tongue and did not say anything about looking like a tourist.
The round Capitol building was meant to look like it was made from plastered adobe in a classic Southwestern style. Jasmine snapped pictures as she circled it, trying to capture the importance of the building while showing the intended, humble architecture.
The Palace of the Governors sat close to the Capitol and Jasmine wandered toward it while lining up shot of the city streets. The site served as a kind of town square for Santa Fe and was surrounded by shops and historical buildings which were used as a headquarters when New Mexico was a part of Old Mexico. Vendors lined the sidewalks in front of the old buildings, hoping to sell Native American jewelry and other trinkets to passing tourists. Jasmine saw it all through her camera’s viewfinder and tried to record anything interesting.
“So you wanna grab lunch before we get outta here?” asked Clara.
“Just a couple of more minutes,” replied Jasmine, determined to get a good shot of the jewelry sellers.
Jasmine walked to one end of the sidewalk and admired the row of tables displaying turquoise rings, bracelets, and necklaces. She bent low and caught the moment when a couple of middle-aged tourists reached toward a silver necklace with obvious wonder and appreciation.
“That’s definitely a look of enchantment,” Jasmine thought to herself.
She and Clara ate a lunch of spicy chili rellenos and drove to the outskirts of town, looking for flat-roofed houses framed by mountains in the background. Clara knew of a riding stable and they snapped off hundreds of shots filled with cowboys, horses, and sunsets.
When they returned to Albuquerque, the friends faced the looming deadline for the photo contest. They both sat at their computers, combing through thousands of pictures from their memory cards. They had to choose one. Of all those moments, which was the most evocative? Which would connect with the contest judges?
Clara kept returning to the minutes she spent at Bisti Badlands. Her photo of the rock towers was powerful and alien. When she looked at it, she could almost feel energy being sucked from the clouds and into the rocks. The feeling was even stronger when she converted the image to black and white and increased the contrast. She captioned the picture “Magic in the Stones” and uploaded it to the contest website.
“Even if I visited that place a million times, I would still think it was amazing,” Clara concluded, to reassure herself about her choice.
The highlights on Jasmine’s computer came from the beginning of her Santa Fe trip. She narrowed her choices down to twenty pictures and then to five. One of those five was her shot of the tourists and jewelry vendors. With a little editing, she made the colors of the Native American dresses and turquoise stones pop on the computer screen. She knew that was the one. She captioned it “Wonder for Sale” and hit the Submit button.
“There’s a reason people visit that spot,” said Jasmine. “Sometimes the most amazing places aren’t undiscovered.”
“So what did you go with?” Clara asked her friend the next day.
“I’m not gonna say until after the contest is over,” Jasmine replied.
“Then I won’t tell you mine, either. We’ll save it for a surprise. You’ll probably win.”
Jasmine smiled and shook her head. “Yeah right. You’ll probably win.”
“We gotta remember that it’s totally subjective. Different judges will pick different pictures. There’s no such thing as ‘the best one.’”
“Yeah, I know. But you’ll still probably win,” replied Jasmine, with the same smile.
Four days later, their photography professor started her lecture with a surprise. She had been one of the judges for the State of Enchantment contest and she was going to reveal the winner right there in front of the class.
“I’m proud to say that someone from our class actually won the Young Artist category and will get the internship,” announced the professor.
She projected a picture onto the wall, showing a Yucca plant lit by the setting sun and growing in a gravel covered yard on an ordinary street. A group of kids rode their bikes in the background.
Clara admitted to herself that the picture was pretty simple, but charming. “I guess I like it,” she whispered to Jasmine.
“That place looks familiar,” Jasmine whispered back.
“This shot was taken by our own Solomon Redhouse,” continued the professor. “Congratulations. Strong work. I also want to show a couple more pictures from the honorable mention group.”
Clara’s tower picture flashed on the wall, followed by the photo of jewelry sellers by Jasmine.
The girls looked at each other in happy surprise. “I can’t believe you went with the rock picture,” said Jasmine.
“I can’t believe you went with your tourist picture,” replied Clara. “The Palace of the Governors? I never would have thought that would get the judges attention.”
“I guess you stop appreciating a place once you’ve seen it enough times,” Jasmine concluded.
After class, they walked together back to their apartments. On their way past one of the intersecting streets, Jasmine stopped and pointed.
“Look at that Yucca. Past the sign. That’s the exact spot where Solomon took the winning shot.”
Clara stared and then shook her head. “And we walk by it every day.”
“I wonder where Solomon lives.”
“Probably not around here,” Clara said with a little sigh.
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