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For over a century, El Palacio has been a forum for voices exploring New Mexico’s art, archaeology, history, and landscape. Explore the writers, photographers, historians, and scientists whose perspectives have defined the magazine’s pages—past and present.
Arthur Sze is the current U.S. Poet Laureate. Sze is a poet, translator, and editor. He is the author of twelve books, including Into the Hush, Sight Lines, and others. Sze’s poems have been translated into fifteen languages, and he is the recipient of the National Book Award among many other honors. He lives in Santa Fe.
Deborah Jackson Taffa is a citizen of the Quechan Nation and Laguna Pueblo. Her memoir Whiskey Tender was a 2024 National Book Award Finalist and was longlisted for the 2025 Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction. Taffa serves as the director of the MFA in creative writing program at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Cara Romero is an award-winning contemporary fine art photographer. An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Romero’s expansive oeuvre has been informed by formal training in film, digital, fine art, and commercial photography. She maintains a studio in Santa Fe, regularly participates in Native American art fairs, and was featured in PBS’ Craft in America (2019).
Daniel Kosharek (opens in a new tab) is a writer and former photo curator at the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives at the New Mexico History Museum.
![A woman in traditional Native American attire stands at the doorway of an adobe building, wearing a fringed dress, beaded accessories, and moccasins. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Color-in-Color_1-400x225.jpg)
The tradition of coloring, or at the least applying a little tint, goes way back to the dawn of photography... Color photography is so ubiquitous that it is easy to forget there was a time when the world was captured only in black and white. From about the late nineteenth to early twentieth century, black-and-white gelatin silver prints ruled all things photographic, and the only color photographs were images that had been hand-colored.
![A man in old Western attire stands outdoors, wearing a wide-brimmed hat, patterned vest, and coat, with one hand resting on his hip and the other holding an object. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/dressed-400x225.jpg)
In 1865, New York Tribune editor Horace Greeley famously urged, “Go West, young man, and grow up with the country.” The imperative suggested economic opportunity, and indeed boundless opportunities greeted the young men and women who struck out on wagon trains and horseback to make their fortunes in the West. But the young, restless, and unemployed also saw the opportunity as a chance to reinvent themselves by tossing off Eastern conventions.
![A young man in military uniform stands smiling beside a vehicle with sandbags stacked in the background. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/vietnam-400x225.jpg)
Vietnam, the televised war, the war that divided us, the war we did not win. Some of us unavoidably served in it, others protested it, many young men died. There is no shortage of photographs documenting the horrors of this “police action.” Military photographers and the free press took millions of photographs of the Vietnam conflict between 1962 and 1975.
![A man and woman pose for a portrait in front of a white sheet in a decorated room, with a dog lying on the floor in the foreground. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Windows-into-Wonder_1-400x225.jpg)
What makes vintage photographs so fascinating? Unidentified folks, long-gone buildings, and the clothes people wore all contribute to the allure of these images. Examining family photo albums, or as is more often the case, “the family shoebox,” brings us in contact with friends and family, captured in youthful exuberance, or perhaps at a last get together years before. Historic or vintage photographs awaken long-dormant memories, providing visual reference points and emotional links to the past.
![A group of people in bohemian attire walk together outdoors, some holding hands and smiling, in a black-and-white photo. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/New-Settlers_1-400x225.jpg)
Arriving on New Mexico’s counterculture scene in the mid- 1960s, Irwin Klein used his camera to tell stories. To look at his photographs today is to feel your shirt sticking to your back from fieldwork, to smell the smoke from cooking fires, and to look into the eyes of someone who shared your philosophy of life and perhaps your communal bed.
![A stone grave marker stands in front of a crumbling stone wall, with a cloudy sky and rural landscape in the background. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Collectors-Collections_1-400x225.jpg)
There are people in the world we call collectors, and if not for them most of our museums and cultural institutions would be empty. It is through their foresight and largesse that we have the incredible richness of art lining the walls of our museums, and artifacts on the shelves of our archives and libraries. Collectors, essentially curators and creators who assemble bodies of work on their particular interests, often see the value of artwork, documents, photographs, and other material long before the rest of us do.
![A brightly painted lowrider car with custom red, yellow, and white designs, lifted on hydraulics, with chrome wheels and trim. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Moving-Passion_1-400x225.jpg)
BY DANIEL KOSHAREK In 1977 Lowrider magazine quietly launched in San Jose, California, with the intent of giving voice to a popular Chicano lifestyle that blossomed after World War II and had yet to be righteously portrayed in print, TV, or film. Riding low and slow, or bajito y suavecito, had become a cultural identity. (more…)
![A black and white image divided into four panels, each showing a distorted, rippling surface resembling water or glass. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Along-the-Pecos_1-400x225.jpg)
One of the staples of desert life is the presence—or scarcity—of water. Its importance can be seen across eastern New Mexico, where the Pecos River strives to quench a fragile, 926-mile riparian environment. In Along the Pecos, photographer Jennifer Schlesinger and the late composer Steven M. Miller use images and sound, respectively, to impart an emotional sense of the river, with a goal of highlighting issues of ecology and our relationship to place.
![Three men stand in a sunlit outdoor corridor next to a stucco building, with plants growing along the wall and a motorcycle visible in the background. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Through-the-Looking-Glass_1-400x225.jpg)
Glass negatives were a boon to photography when they were first introduced in the 1860s. But it was with the invention of the gelatin dry-plate glass negative, coming on the market in 1871, that the medium really established itself as an alternative to the messy wet-plate process or the unreliability of early paper negatives. A thin sheet of glass covered with a silver salts emulsion was so much easier to use than the wet collodian process that it enabled early photographers such as William Henry Jackson and Ben Wittick to traverse the West, capturing some of their later iconic images.
![Three covered wagons, each pulled by horses, travel through a grassy landscape and cross a shallow stream in a rural setting. [gen-ai]](https://elpalacio.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Trail-of-Hard-Knocks_1-scaled-1-400x225.jpg)
When Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail,” he could have been talking about the early days of the Santa Fe Trail, which eventually left a track from Missouri to New Mexico. All such journeys, whether along the beaten path or through pathless wilderness, involved saying goodbye to those who were left behind.
