Native Visions – Photographs by Don Kirby

Cultural Property News is privileged to share images of ancient Native American dwellings and rock drawings by photographer Don Kirby. All images are copyright Don Kirby.

Kirby and his wife, photographer Joan Gentry, have walked hundred of miles across the Southwest to memorialize relics of the ancient Puebloan culture. The images in this group of photos from the series, Ancestral Pueblos of the Colorado Plateau, are not identified except by state, in order to protect the site locations.

Born to sharecropper parents in Northwestern Missouri, Kirby studied math and physics and became an aerospace engineer while maintaining a sideline in mountaineering and backpacking. Photography became a full-time vocation by the 1980s. When they are not deep in the desert, Don and Joan teach and run photography workshops around the country. Their home base is Santa Fe.

Kirby’s photographs are included in the collections of the George Eastman House, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Joy of Giving Something, NY, the Houston Museum of Fine Arts, the Portland Art Museum, the Peabody Essex Museum, the New Mexico History Museum, the St. Petersburg Museum of Fine Art in Florida, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art in Eugene, OR, and the Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Williamette University.