A glimpse into the past

Two friends turn 100-year-old photograph cache into calendar series

From Telluride News: A lot of life can fit into a small, timeworn box no bigger than a dusty old novel, along with a good dose of mystery, too. When Vern Ince of Dolores acquired a small box of dry glass plate photographs from a friend at a pawn shop in Farmington, New Mexico, over a decade ago, he traded $300 for a time-traveling journey into the Four Corners region of a century ago. Many of the photos reveal glimpses into the daily lives of both Native American and Anglo residents of the region and offer a photographic record of Navajo culture as lived 100 years ago.

When Ince first saw the box, he was intrigued, though the pawn shop owner, a former business associate, was reluctant to part with the plates.

“An old gray-haired Navajo man came in one day with a box of photos on glass plates,” Ince recounted, recalling how the photos arrived at the pawn shop. After purchasing them from the Navajo man, the pawn shop owner wanted to keep them, despite Ince’s piqued interest.

“Then one day the timing was right,” Ince said, who paid the requested sum without knowing how many photographs were in the box or what kind of quality he would find. As it turned out, most of the nearly 300 historical photographs remained intact, offering crisp images of Navajo women in long dresses, families in buggies, the region’s first oil rig and depictions of ranching life.

Ince reached out to his old friend, David Reineke, a history buff and former art teacher who was handy with photo editing software. The two teamed up to restore life to the old, chipped rectangles of glass imprinted with the vestiges of another era. Reineke’s wife, Jan, painstakingly scanned the hundreds of slides, digitizing them for safekeeping, and Reineke got to work in Photoshop, patching holes and blemishes and carefully retouching the black-and-white images.

In one image, a young Navajo woman in long skirts and draped in a fringed blanket sits astride a horse, the wall of a stone hogan, or traditional home, just visible at the photo’s edge. She gazes directly into the camera, the barest hint of a smile tugging at one corner of her lips, though her expression is hard to read.

In another, a Native young man in a felt hat clutches a fiercely bucking bull, the onlookers in the background blurred but the action sharp, captured in the bulging of the bull’s eye as it attempts to forcefully unseat its rider.

“It was a very heavy camera that would have been used here,” said Reineke, estimating that the rodeo pictured took place between 1910 and 1922. “Look at the bull’s eye. A hundred years ago, isn’t that something?”

Wanting to share the historical images with others, the two friends, both 77, decided to create a calendar. Since many of the photographs are shot in or near the Hogback rock formation in western New Mexico on the Navajo Nation, the two men settled on the name “Hogback in Time” for their calendars. So far, they’ve created 2020 and 2021 editions, and have plans to print another edition for 2022. The 2021 calendar is available for purchase at Between the Covers Bookstore.

Meanwhile, the photographer behind the lens of the images featured in the calendars remains shrouded in mystery, despite the pair’s efforts to dig up clues.

“I have been trying to figure out who the photographer was for years and there was absolutely no clue, anywhere,” said Reineke. That hasn’t stopped the duo from staying on the scent, and they hope to one day discover the photographer’s identity. Thanks to a recent tip from a Durango resident, they feel they may finally be getting close to unraveling the mystery.

In the meantime, the identities of the people in the photographs, along with that of the person behind the lens, remains shrouded in the shadows cast by a century of obscurity. Despite the anonymity, the faces in the images speak silently to the viewer, expressions hinting by turns at mischief, boredom, contentedness, curiosity, and sometimes, simply a quiet inscrutability. A lot may have changed for residents of the region in the past 100 years, but the human story of struggle, camaraderie and community continues.

For more information or any clues regarding the identities of people or places in the photographs, Ince and Reineke can be reached at hogbackintime@gmail.com.

Read the original story at:  https://www.telluridenews.com/news/article_1603ed40-7c7c-11eb-b377-6b3255e8cb16.html