In her latest collection of photographs, Santa Fe-based photographer Joan Myers (born 1944) turns her lens to the American West, capturing both the myth and the reality, its shaping and appropriation by Hollywood and the ever-present but fracturing American dream.
They show us a past that still affects, and reflects, our present, revealing unexpected insights into how the myths of the West were formed and how they relate to reality.".
In deconstructing the pictures, cultural critic Lucy Lippard notes that they "seem to emerge from cracks in American culture.
A man in Wrangler jeans and a cowboy hat sits for his portrait on a dais with a Hopi maiden and cows and deer made out of barbed wire in front of a curtain featuring a photograph of iconic cliffs and sky.
A larger-than-life statue of a cowboy stands on the same lot with a 1960s Cadillac Coupe de Ville.
In her latest collection of photographs, Santa Fe-based photographer Joan Myers (born 1944) turns her lens to the American West, capturing both the myth and the reality, its shaping and appropriation by Hollywood and the ever-present but fracturing American dream
