Island artist Edward Grazda brings photography of the southwest to A Gallery in Oak Bluffs this week in the gallery’s first focused show of the season. His show, titled “Landscapes of the Four Corners,” opens on Saturday, June 7, at 5 pm.
The exhibit at A Gallery will be the first time that Mr. Grazda’s southwest prints, which focus on trading posts set up by Anglo traders throughout the Navajo Reservation, will ever be shown to the public.
“I’ve been going out to the Four Corners area since I was in college,” Mr. Grazda said in an interview last week. “I really like it out there.”
Mr. Grazda’s first encounter with the area was during his college years at Rhode Island School of Design in the 1970s when, inspired by Civil War photographer Timothy O’Sullivan, he traveled west to photograph the unique landscape. His early trips focused on the various terrains and landmarks of the Navajo reservation, which covers 27,000 miles through Utah, Arizona, and New Mexico. It was then that he first photographed the structures known as trading posts, though it was not until 2010 that they became his artistic focus.
“The trading posts are interesting to me historically because they’re where the Anglo culture and Indian culture meet,” said Mr. Grazda, who, with a Leica loaded with black-and-white 35mm film in hand, has amassed roughly 200 photographs of these posts over the last four years.
The Four Corners trading posts are one-story structures that were erected in the 1800s by Anglo traders as a place to exchange and barter wool, blankets, and live stock for dry goods with Native American locals. Despite their being some of the only man-made landmarks in the area (along with the occasional ranch and farm), they can hard to find; most are located down winding dirt roads and require either a keen eye for the rulings that mark them or a local to lead the way, both of which Mr. Grazda has employed for his project.
“[The project] gave me a reason to drive down all these different roads with a purpose,” Mr. Grazda said. “A lot of [the posts] I had never been to, and a lot of them you really have to look for…. It’s like an exploration to find them.”
Mr. Grazda’s photos express a desolate isolation in the smallness of the posts against the backdrop of a vast desert and open sky. This isolation is amplified by his medium of black-and-white film, which evokes a sense of age and nostalgia.
In recent years the photos have become a mode of preserving and remembering the trading posts while large supermarkets, Navajo souvenir shops, and hardware stores have come in to replace them. The images of “Landscapes of the Four Corners” are portraits of these remaining lonely landmarks, some of which are still standing and some of which are merely rubble on the ground.
Between his first trips to the west in the 1970s and the revival of his trading post project in 2010, Mr. Grazda has photographed parts of the Middle East, New York City, and South America. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and Vanity Fair and is in collections at the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the New York Public Library, among others. He and his wife, Valerie Sonnenthal, now live in Chilmark year-round. He is currently creating a book of his trading post images to catalogue their evolution and disappearance over the past 40 years.
“Landscapes of the Four Corners” is the first time that the southwest will be a geographic focus for A Gallery, which proprietor Tanya Augoustinos opened in 2012 as a venue for established and emerging Island artists to display contemporary, non-Vineyard specific artwork.
“I’m fond of the southwest. I think it’s a part of history that gets overlooked,” Ms. Augoustinos said of her interest in Mr. Grazda’s work.
Twenty-four of Mr. Grazda’s trading post images will appear in the show, which will be displayed on the gallery’s main back wall through June 19. His photographs, along with books of his photography of the Middle East and New York, will be available for perusal and purchase through June 19.
Mr. Grazda’s show is the first in A Gallery’s extensive summer lineup, which includes paintings by Alejandro Carreno, Stella Waitzkin’s sculptures, photographs by Mariana Cook, pastels of Irving Petlin, and more. The gallery is open daily from 10 am to 5 pm, with the exception of Tuesdays. For more information, visit the gallery’s website, robertmorrisoncreative.com/agallery, or Mr. Grazda’s site, edwardgrazda.com.