EL PASO, Teas (KTSM) — The Branigan Cultural Center in Las Cruces will feature the work of Mesilla photographer Emmitt Booher as he brings to life the iconic landscapes of White Sands National Park.
The exhibit of Booher’s work, called “Dunes & Dreams: A Portrait of White Sands National Park,” opens Friday, Sept. 6, and continues through Wednesday, Oct. 16, at Branigan Cultural Center (BCC), 501 N. Main St. in Las Cruces.
Photos taken by Emmitt Booher/Courtesy of Emmitt Booher
The show includes 21 black-and-white photographs by Booher.
Beginning with the first photos he took with a 4×5 film camera in the 1980s, Booher said in a news release he “felt a connection to this mysterious landscape, an iconic area that draws you to it. It’s so vast, so overwhelming – the sky, the dunes, the brilliance and the vistas.”
Repeated visits to White Sands over the next nearly 40 years “allows it to start speaking to you,” Booher said. “It’s so vast, overwhelming, almost intimidating. What do you do with this to create something?”
For Booher, the answer lay partly in using a tripod to take his photos, which “allows me to slow down and get a sense of place,” he said, and to reduce the vastness “to a much more intimate composition.”
The exhibition of Booher’s White Sands photographs was originally scheduled for 2020, but was interrupted by the pandemic. Booher’s photographs were hung in BCC from November 2020 to February 2021, but there were no visitors. Booher exhibited many of the photos at Light Art Space gallery in Silver City in 2022.
“During the lockdown I spent a good amount of time at White Sands, before everyone else rediscovered it,” Booher said. “During this time, I created an additional series of work, ‘No Sky, No Earth, Only You and Me’ that I feel are among the most powerful of the entire collection. This series seemed to mirror the isolation and reflective time that the COVID lockdown created.”
Booher has created limited editions of his photographs, which are for sale.
A native New Mexican, Booher grew up on a ranch in eastern New Mexico. He credits that rural environment “for instilling a lifelong appreciation of the landscape, history and people of New Mexico.”
The opening reception for “Dunes and Dreams” is 5 to 7 p.m. Sept. 6 at BCC, with Booher presenting an artist’s talk at 5:30 p.m. There is no charge to attend the reception or to visit the show.
BCC is open 10 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Tuesday through Friday and 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Saturday.
For more information, contact BCC at (575) 541-2154. You can also click here for more information on the Branigan Cultural Center.
