Santa Fe has fine photography galleries and shops, but if you want real depth, especially in images of the American Southwest, check out the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives. Just how many photos are in the collections? “Lots,” said the facility’s photo archivist, Hannah Abelbeck, with a laugh. “Hundreds of thousands, perhaps a million. If I were to look at every image we have for three seconds, I would never finish in a lifetime of workdays.” Some in the collection are glass-plate negatives made in the days before the invention of photographic film. The Photo Archives, a department of the New Mexico History Museum, holds photographic items dating from the mid-1800s to contemporary times.

It and the Museum of New Mexico’s Fray Angélico Chávez History Library are located in the remodeled quarters of the Women’s Board of Trade Library on Lincoln Avenue, built in 1907. The Photo Archives also contain thousands of books about photography. One of them is Through the Lens: Creating Santa Fe (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2008) by Mary Anne Redding and Krista Elrick. Redding worked at the archives for several years during the long tenure of Daniel Kosharek, who retired as archivist in 2019. New Mexico has long been important in photography.

Beaumont Newhall, who established the photography department at New York’s Museum of Modern Art in 1940, ended his career as a faculty member at the University of New Mexico from 1971 to 1984. “There’s a whole scene in Santa Fe of major photographers coming through here and working here,” said Abelbeck, who has been with the archives for eight years. One was Ansel Adams, whose Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, 1941 became one of his most famous images. Laura Gilpin, Eliot Porter, Anne Noggle, Walter Chappell, Paul Caponigro and William Clift are among the other Americans renowned for their camera work in New Mexico.

“We are a research department and a collection-holding department of the history museum,” Abelbeck said. “The department has a long history, and we have sort of inherited collections from the Museum of New Mexico. We have collections related to the history of folk art, related to archaeology, and there is overlap in the collections here and the photography collections of the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.”

The archives also hold the legacy of the Historical Society of New Mexico, which is no longer a collecting body. When the Photo Archives consolidated in the 1960s and 1970s, the curator was Richard Rudisill. “He took a really strong interest in photo history,” Abelbeck said. “So some of our holdings on the Southwest are supplemented by larger looks at 19th-century photography. We have a really strong mission now to collect images that represent the state’s history.” Rudisill was in the photo program at UNM just before the arrival of Newhall, and the two had different approaches, Abelbeck explained. Rudisill’s was similar to that of photo historian Peter Palmquist, more focused on commercial photography.

Newhall was more about photography as a modernist art form. T. Harmon Parkhurst, who was active in Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico from the 1910s through the 1940s, is

one of Abelbeck’s and digital imaging archivist Catelyn Carl’s favorite photographers. Parkhurst, trained by Museum of New Mexico photographer Jesse Nusbaum, went on to establish his own photo business. “He had a clear, documentary style,” Abelbeck said. “When it succeeds very well, it’s a sharp image, there are things going on and you know where to look. When it goes wrong, it looks a little fake; it can look staged.” “Out of the big collections we have, he’s my favorite,” Carl added. “Some of his photos are more posed, but he did a lot of lovely candid images of daily life and of the pueblos.

I come from a fine art background and working in photo galleries, so I’m drawn to images more on the aesthetic level, where Hannah is very interested in the history and background.” Abelbeck started doing social media posts a few years ago on Facebook, Tumblr and Twitter; Carl more recently added Instagram. “We do daily posts, like a photo of the day,” she said. “We put up some of our favorites, or images that relate to holidays or our museum exhibitions. We have a pretty active audience. We’re reaching more people who didn’t even know that the Photo Archives existed.”

Carl digitizes photos that aren’t yet online, but more often she’s filling orders for people. The requests for images come from citizens, newspapers and magazines, book publishers, state museums and others. To order high-quality digital scans, start your search at nmhistorymuseum.org/collections/photo-archives. Browsing the archive is terrific fun. “Our subject files include cities and towns, notable people, the pueblos, the Palace of the Governors, different industries, historic streets,” Carl said. “Somebody might be renovating a historic building and they want to see photos of what it used to look like.” If you’re aiming for specific subjects, you may have to get creative. The search for images for this article turned up the fact that there are no “winter” or “Christmas” categories — we had to look for likely connections, such as “Canyon Road” for pictures of Christmas farolitos.

Or you can do searches in the online collection on keywords like “Christmas,” “Feliz” and “winter.” Our holiday-related finds ran the gamut: an early 1880s stereograph image of a snowy Santa Fe Plaza and a 1989 Nancy Hunter Warren photo of a San Ildefonso woman at a Christmas Day Buffalo Dance. Then there’s the 1920s “Merrie Christmas” holiday card from Pauline Johnson, postmistress of Loving, New Mexico. “We’ve done some Christmas card-related programming, and people seem to really like it,”

Abelbeck said. “[The] image isn’t that great; it’s just the idea that a town’s postmistress would send out her own Christmas cards like this.” You can order prints for display, publication or multimedia projects. “They can buy a fine art reproduction print on archival paper,” Carl explained. “I do that occasionally.” She says that “there’s no charge if you come in to do research for up to an hour, but we are pretty backed up [with orders] because of COVID.” For an appointment to visit the Photo Archives, email photoarchives@ state.nm.us. To explore the wealth of photographs in the archives’ online adjunct, log on to nmhistorymuseum.org and click on “collections.”

Paul Weideman retired in March after 24 years with “The Santa Fe New Mexican” and is now a part-time writer. He is the author of the 2019 book “Architecture Santa Fe: A Guidebook.”