Landmarks Landscapes

From ancient civilizations to contemporary tourism, Grazda’s scrapbook of the Four Corners region is a robust portrait of the American Southwest

The American Southwest has captivated photographers over many years for its wide vistas, history and culture. Alexander Gardner, Adam Clark Vroman, William Henry Jackson, Ansel Adams and Mark Klett have all been attracted to its vast spaces and history. As a young man, inspired by the photographs of Timothy H. O’Sullivan, American photographer Edward Grazda first traveled to the Four Corners area of the American Southwest in 1969 and has since been drawn back many times. Combining his photographs with maps, film stills and postage stamps, Grazda takes the viewer on a journey around the Four Corners intersection of Utah, Colorado, Arizona and New Mexico. Sometimes following the route of the 1776 expedition of Spanish explorers Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélex de Escalante and at other times searching for abandoned trading posts on the Navajo Reservation, Grazda addresses the history, culture, religion, weather and myths of the Four Corners region.
Born in 1947 in Flushing, Queens, Edward Grazda studied photography at the Rhode Island School of Design. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, Vanity Fair and Granta and is in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Public Library and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, among others. He has received grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts, and has been a MacDowell Colony Fellow four times.