Craig Varjabedian’s Landscape Dreams: New Mexico-Arizona Book Award
The winners in 53 categories of the 2013 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards were announced at an awards banquet at the Hotel Albuquerque Friday, November 15th. Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico Portrait with Photographs by Craig Varjabedian won for Best Art Book, published by the University of New Mexico Press.
Varjabedian, winner of the National Cowboy & Western Heritage’s Outstanding Photography Book in 2010, is a fine art photographer and instructor. He is also the author of Ghost Ranch and the Faraway Nearby, Four & Twenty Photographs: Stories From Behind the Lens and En Divina Luz: The Penitente Moradas of New Mexico.
“In this moment I find myself humbled and without words yet a line from Twelfth Night appears in my mind: ‘I can no other answer make but thanks, And thanks, and ever thanks…’ I send this thank you out to the good jurors of the book award and to everyone who purchased a copy of the book,” said Craig Varjabedian after receiving the news.
Landscape Dreams, A New Mexico Portrait presents a selection of Craig Varjabedian’s photographs, made over the nearly three decades that he has lived and worked in New Mexico, range over all the image-making forms – landscape, portrait, and still life – to offer a remarkably complete, varied, and original portrait of what many call the “Land of Enchantment.” White sand desert, cloud-capped peaks, ancient adobe ruins, groves of autumn cottonwoods – all find their place here. Intimate, personal, and yet iconic, the photographs capture a land and its people in a collection that will be warmly welcomed by those who already love New Mexico but serve also as an inviting introduction for newcomers to its diverse and captivating uniqueness. Fittingly, the photographs, all beautifully presented in elegant duotone reproductions, celebrate the hundred years of New Mexico’s statehood begun in 1912. Here, paired with images of Native American sites that go back to earlier millennia, such as the ruins at Bandelier National Monument, are artifacts of the modern world, like the familiar outline of a pumpjack in an oil patch and a lowrider Cadillac outside the wall that protects the Santuario de Chimayo. The book is available at fine book stores and Amazon.com.
http://www.craigvarjabedian.com