Lee Marmon

1925 Laguna, New Mexico - 2021 Albuquerque, New Mexico

BiographyLee Marmon was first introduced to photography as a young boy by his father, Hank, who began taking photos with a Kodak postcard camera in 1916. Hank may have been influenced by the many Euro-American photographers who came through the pueblo and stayed with his family in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Edward S. Curtis, Ben Wittick and Adam Clark Vroman. Their work, especially Vroman’s, greatly impacted Lee.

After photographing the accident [at age 11], it would be a decade before Marmon chose photography as his passion and career. In the meantime, he sold “all kinds of things” to make money, from copies of the Los Angeles Examiner and the Denver Post to salve and window cleaner. After running away from the Albuquerque Indian School and graduating from Grants High School, Marmon studied geology at the University of New Mexico beginning in 1942.

In 1943, the U.S. Army called. During World War II, Marmon was shipped off to Alaska and stationed on remote Shemya Island in the Aleutians. While a sergeant major at the station hospital, Lee took a class on photography. After he returned home in 1946, he purchased his first camera: a 2 ¼ x 3 ¼ “baby” Graflex Speed Graphic, the same used by many newspaper reporters.

Marmon recalled his father encouraging him around 1947 to take photos of elders. So began Marmon’s legacy of portraits of his people and homelands, taken mostly from the late 1940s through the 1960s. As he delivered groceries for his father’s trading post, he photographed elders, asking permission and gifting them prints in return—he never charged elders a fee. He used the light in which he found them, without photographic reflectors; he relied instead on the naturally illuminating walls of the pueblo as an alternate light source.

Lee’s interest in geology endured; his favorite subject was his New Mexico homelands. Though his best-known landscapes were taken in black-and-white, some of his most prominent were in color. His beloved Marmon family land southwest of Laguna at Dripping Springs was a frequent theme in his photographs and stories.

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