Four Corners

Description for FOUR CORNERS by Debra Bloomfield:

In 1989 photographer Debra Bloomfield got into her car and headed east from California. Near Oak Creek Canyon in Arizona she began photographing, feeling somehow a part of the landscape through which she traveled. For the next ten years, she would sojourn in the desert and mountain regions of the Southwest three or four times a year, expanding her horizons topographically and spiritually, capturing with her camera a juxtaposition of vast spaces and lonely intimacy inherent in the terrain that surrounded her.

In 1997 she found herself in Las Trampas, New Mexico, and discovered through its church and others like it in the northern areas of the state that interior spaces can evoke the same kinds of meanings for her as landscapes do. In both, she felt a sense of place and history, of hope and transformation. At once ethereal and haunting, her images are also transcendent, suggesting a balance between spiritual and secular.

“Debra Bloomfield’s Four Corners photographs capture the unique intersection of earth and sky and Spanish and Native American cultures that exists in the American Southwest. In these soulful works, nature and humanity seem to be of one piece, or perhaps more accurately, of one dream. Simultaneously harsh and serene, Bloomfield’s images of mesas and saints are imbued with a powerful spirituality that, as anyone who has been to this remarkable region can attest, is as real as it is compelling.”—Lawrence Rinder, curator of contemporary art, Whitney Museum of American Art