Born in Colorado, Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) attended a Connecticut preparatory school to study music. She received her first camera at the age of 12 and after some time, her mother took her east to meet pioneer photographer and native Coloradan Gertrude Käsebier, who advised professional training. Gilpin eventually established and sold a successful turkey farm in western Colorado in order to fund her education. She studied at the prestigious Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York where her studies with White led her to initially embrace a Pictorialist style that emphasized beauty and artistic creation over photography’s documentary qualities. As photography advanced in the early decades of the 20th century, Gilpin turned away from the Pictorialist-inspired images and began taking “straight photographs.”

Sent back to Colorado with Spanish influenza in 1918, Gilpin formed a lifelong friendship with her nurse, Elizabeth Forster. She also became a professional contract photographer, offering portraiture while promoting business, educational, tourist, and health institutions. She found her most meaningful subjects on trips with Forster in the homelands of the Pueblo and Navajo. During World War II, Gilpin was publicity director for Boeing Aircraft in Wichita, Kansas, where she artistically represented commercial subjects and discovered aerial photography.

Gilpin moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico in 1946. In a field traditionally championed by men, Gilpin was one of the first women to capture the landscape of the West becoming widely known for her extended documentation of the Southwestern landscape and the Diné (Navajo) people. She published several books, most notably The Enduring Navaho, which was released in 1968. Gilpin received honorary doctorates and state arts awards in both New Mexico and Colorado.