To Walk in Beauty Photographs by Stacia Spragg-Braude. Afterword by M. Scott Momaday. Published by Museum Of New Mexico Press, 2009.
When I picked up Stacia Spragg-Braude’s remarkable book “
To Walk in Beauty: A Navajo Family’s Return Home,” I was in the middle of a schedule so jammed with things to do that contemplation of anything – deep, quiet, soul-nurturing reflection -- seemed completely impossible.
It is a measure of the power of her work that I sat quietly for quite some time, taking in the images and the stories from her black-and-white project documenting the life of a Navajo family and the rebirth of their cultural values. What began as a weekend assignment for Spragg-Braude turned into a ten-year journey as she moved deeper and deeper into the life of the Begay family – Navajos reclaiming a heritage nearly destroyed by US government’s aggressive nineteenth-century campaign to take their land and cut them off from their culture. Part of that cultural revival includes a return to herding and husbanding Churro sheep, which bear deep spiritual significance for the Navajos and were nearly wiped out after drastic government forced herd reductions as a measure against overgrazing.
To Walk in Beauty, by Stacia Spragg-Braude. Published by Museum Of New Mexico Press, 2009.
Spragg-Braude was clearly accepted by the Begays in the course of her work, capturing intimate photos of family scenes, of life and death and joy and ritual. The images are accompanied by interviews with the Begay family that illumine cultural traditions and family history. Although the sequencing is at times unclear, the images themselves are always quiet and often powerfully compelling: an elderly woman sprawled on a forest floor collecting pinon nuts; an outstretched hand reaching towards a fire’s eerie flames; the blurry, dusk image of a girl walking down a dirt road followed by dogs from the reservation. That Spragg-Braude was a finalist for the W. Eugene Smith Award in 2006 is no surprise; that she didn’t actually win the award is a shame. Her work carries within it a tenderness, a gentle humanitarianism that exemplified Smith’s work – and which seems to have been too often lacking in the work of winners in recent years.
To Walk in Beauty, by Stacia Spragg-Braude. Published by Museum Of New Mexico Press, 2009.
To Walk in Beauty, by Stacia Spragg-Braude. Published by Museum Of New Mexico Press, 2009.
With “
To Walk in Beauty” (a title which refers to a Navajo prayer), Spragg-Braude has created a thing of beauty – something that should stop all of us in our busy tracks and cause us to consider what is of value, of beauty, what must be defended, not just in Navajo culture but in our own lives and in the world around us.
—Sara Terry
Sara Terry A former staff correspondent for the Christian Science Monitor and magazine freelance writer, Sara Terry made a mid-career transition into documentary photography in the late 1990s. Her long-term project about the aftermath of war in Bosnia -- “Aftermath: Bosnia’s Long Road to Peace” -- was published in September 2005 by Channel Photographics, and was named as one of the best photo books of the year by Photo District News. Her work has been widely exhibited, at such venues as the United Nations, the Museum of Photography in Antwerp, and the Moving Walls exhibition at the Open Society Institute. She is the founder of The Aftermath Project (www.theaftermathproject.org), a non-profit grant program which helps photographers cover the aftermath of conflict. She is currently directing and producing "Fambul Tok," a documentary about a post-conflict forgiveness and reconciliation program in Sierra Leone, which recently won a grant from the Sundance Documentary Institute.
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