The Hidden Photobooks: To Walk in Beauty
To Walk in Beauty: a Navajo Family’s Journey Home
Stacia Spragg-Braude
Museum of New Mexico Press, Santa Fe, 2009
The first time I saw this photobook I was reminded of Danish photographer Jacob Aue Sobol’s book “Sabine”, where a trip to Denmark to document a hunting community turned into a three year love affair. This was, of course, before he went all high-contrast Provoke/Moriyama on us.
Like Sobol, Stacia Spragg-Braude found her short term project took her longer than expected, a weekend’s work becoming a ten year intimate portrait of four generations of the Navajo Begay family, “a family” as Spragg-Braude writes in her introduction, “trying in its most fragile, spiritual, imperfect, and beautiful way to live their elders’ teachings in this world and to pass along an identity to the children.”
The title of this book comes from a Navajo healing prayer, and in its black and white photographs we witness not only Navajo rites and rituals, but the family’s ongoing struggle to farm the Churro sheep they are re-introducing to the Arizona reservation, (the sheep so long synonymous with their people but taken from them from the mid-19th century on through the 1930s and ‘40s), as well as the more prosaic moments of their lives.
This is a book to spend some time with; these photographs move when they have to, and when they have to be still, they are still.
When not part of the current display, you can find it here: folio E99.N3S7 (America – Indians of North America – Navajo)
See also: Jacob Aue Sobol’s Sabine portfolio in Granta per PN2.G8. Issue 136
-MG
Come along to the Main Library on North Street to take a look for yourself. This book is part of The Hidden Photobooks display which is running from 1 – 30 September and is part of the St Andrews Photography Festival. Everyone is welcome and the event is free. Check out the Library Instagram for photographs Marcus has chosen from his own work to accompany these blog posts.