Author(s): Joan Myers (By (photographer)); Lucy R. Lippard (Text by)

Art and Photography

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. A larger-than-life statue of a cowboy stands on the same lot with a 1960s Cadillac Coupe de Ville. 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.

In deconstructing the pictures, cultural critic Lucy Lippard notes that they "seem to emerge from cracks in American culture. 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."