Handling Karl’s Photography

Carolyn’s Labor of Love

After Karl’s unexpected and untimely death in January of 1997, I was faced with a deluge of unfolding duties. One of the first things I discovered was that I needed to get an appraisal of his photography, and that is when I first realized the daunting weight of the responsibility for his work, which was more wide-ranging and substantial than I had imagined. I contacted Andrew Smith, a fine art photography dealer in Santa Fe that Karl had worked with and trusted. But first, I had to undertake the huge task of organizing and inventorying what amounted to roughly 2500 prints sitting in boxes in my home, over 14,000 transparencies, over 25,000 negatives, many reels of 16mm film, and many boxes of videotape of Alaska and Micronesia.

I was generally familiar with Karl’s photography, as he had many prints framed on our walls, and on our shelves we had many books and magazines that his photos were published in. Still passionately in the creative phase of his life, he had been a producer at KNME-TV when I met him, and had continued moving more into documentary television, a shift from the still photography he had done for so many years. I had watched his handling of requests to buy rights to print various images in magazines and books, an ongoing source of occasional income. However, I wasn’t with him during his early years and didn’t have the total context. He had talked to me quite a bit about different projects that he had worked on, as topics came up, but I wasn’t taking notes. I had always admired and appreciated many aspects of his photography, partly because the subject material of the cultural richness and landscape beauty of the Southwest was of interest to me as well.

I did have a good sense of Karl’s Yukon River material because he did sound recordings on the 1989 trip we took together to Alaska and the Yukon Territory, as well as video, as further steps on the project he’d had on hold for some 15 years. He had just converted all the 16mm film he had shot in 1963 to video, he had shown me many still photos he took, and he had told me some of his ideas about how he was envisioning that project. Over many nights at bedtime, he read aloud his journal from that 1963 Yukon River trip to me, and I “got it.” There was ancillary material as well, including maps and his other notebooks. But all of this was scattered in different boxes and files, and interspersed with material on other projects and trips that I was only somewhat familiar with.

Organizing and classifying Karl’s oeuvre was only possible because he himself was well-organized, for example, coding all the negative strips with dates and numbers to coordinate with the corresponding contact prints, all in binders. His best transparencies were organized and labeled in drawers, long ago culled from the thousands of images he shot.  

I began methodically looking at the boxes of prints, which were of several different sizes, from 4”x6” to 16”x20”, only some of which were labeled. I referred to the many boxes and file drawers of published photos to get more identifying information, and began to derive some organizing principles, not just the subjects, such as rock art, Tarahumara people, or ghost towns, but also date and place. I talked to several of his friends who were also professional photographers and had taken trips with him, many of whom I had met and had a good relationship with. They were familiar with the overall scope of his work and they gave me guidance and also contextual information. Karl had compiled a detailed several-page resume in 1992 with information about different projects, such as the Huichol people in Mexico and Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico. This information further helped me contextualize the images with the purposes of each project.

To put this all in the context of my life, not only was I trying to stay afloat emotionally after his tragic death, and take care of my 10-year-old daughter and 16-year-old son, but I was only a few months into a new job as Training Coordinator for a non-profit, and I had major financial concerns. After several months of juggling all these new demands, I reluctantly decided to quit my salaried job and try to survive on rental income from the few homes we owned. Thus my main focus for the next several years became Karl’s photography.

I knew that his photos had historic, archeological and anthropological significance, and his gifted eye brought a strong esthetic into play. I understood the enormity and the importance of Karl’s photography, and I realized that I was going to have to figure out who I could sell it to. I was contacted by the Museum of New Mexico Photo Archives in 1997, who wanted to purchase his entire negative collection, with corresponding contact prints. The archivists there were familiar with his work beginning from when he was employed by the Museum of NM as a photographer in the early 1960s.

The appraisal had given me a reference point for value, and by 1999, I had begun working with Johnsons Gallery in Madrid, NM. I framed a few photos at a time, exhibiting them, and happily, selling some. I also printed a few transparencies I’d pulled out and liked, and in 2000 I mounted a 52-photo retrospective of his work there. The Johnsons were extremely warm-hearted and helpful to me, coming to my home at least once to help with selection of photos. As part of producing the Ghost Towns of New Mexico book, Karl had shot many photos of Madrid in the early 1960s, which they were especially excited about displaying. Once I had sold a few prints at Johnsons Gallery, I maintained consistent pricing. I sold prints to individuals in other venues as well, such as at a cafe in Santa Fe and a brewpub in Socorro. As part of sales to museums and archives, I often included group price discounts and donations of related material, and the transactions were always consistently structured.

There were numerous issues to research and determine, such as the copyright on his Sun Dagger images and others in Chaco Canyon, since he had also, much to his regret, done “work for hire” at Chaco. Other images I knew were extremely important historically and culturally, such as the photos of Glen Canyon and Rainbow Bridge before the dam was erected over the decade 1956-1966.

I was realizing that not only the Yukon River material, but also the Tarahumara photography and other groupings were their own large collections, and probably needed to be separated out. The decision to divide up his work was one I reached over several months while talking to archivists in several museums in Santa Fe and Albuquerque, as well as continuing conversations with Karl’s friends who were photographers. I continued contacting people that had been suggested to me, at the University of Washington, the Smithsonian and the Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC, and various museums and archives in Denver, Phoenix, Tucson, and Los Angeles, as well as museums in Mexico.

The director of the Center of Southwest Research at UNM at that time, Mike Kelly,  took a special interest in Karl’s photography, initially buying a collection of political photos from the late 1960s. He was able to arrange purchase of several collections over the next few years, such as the photos Karl shot for the two books Land of Clear Light and Wild Rivers of North America.

After much communication over many months, in 2005 the University of Washington photo archivist came to my home in New Mexico to assess the Yukon River material, and then secured financing to purchase the many parts of that collection. I was extremely relieved to find an archival home for it, having felt special responsibility for it, knowing its historic importance and Karl’s passion for the Alaska-Yukon area and people.

Another collection which I separated out was photos (and original slides) of the re-enactment of the Run which precipitated the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, held in 1980. Karl was the only photographer to accompany the runners the entire distance from Taos to Hopi, and his photos were widely published. I ultimately sold these photos to the New Mexico Indian Affairs Department, a particularly appropriate archive. The Secretary of the Department himself, Benny Shendo, was involved as a 16-year-old runner in the re-enactment, and his grandfather and other elders he knew were also involved, and he was thrilled to get the photos, which included five framed enlargements.

Karl’s photography of rock art was primarily from his working with Polly Schaafsma on her books, and was extensive. This was a collection I approached the NM Museum of Indian Arts and Culture with, and over a couple of years I worked out a donation agreement with them for the hundreds of transparencies and over a thousand prints. They had no budget for acquisition, and were delighted to have this collection. I kept some enlargements which I sold primarily through eBay in 2015-16.

The photography Karl had done in the late 1950s and early 1960s of ghost towns around New Mexico was widely spread across the state, but about half of it was in the SW corner of the state around Silver City. I decided to divide that collection geographically and work with the Silver City Museum so that people in that area would have easier access to photos taken in their locality than if they were to have to travel to Albuquerque or Santa Fe. The balance of the ghost town photos was another acquisition by CSWR.

The photography of the Tarahumara/Raramuri people was extensive, and spanned several years, with images of the Sierra Madre Mountains as well as intimate shots of the daily life of the people. In 1990 we took a family trip to Mexico, and took the train from Chihuahua City, across the Sierra Madres, to the Gulf of California. We stayed over in a small town in the Sierra Madres, where many Tarahumara/Raramuri people were selling their handicrafts to tourists. Karl talked to us about these people, who lived deep in the mountainous area, and I felt a connection to the people in his photos. The collection comprised over 600 transparencies, approximately 200 unframed prints, and 27 framed prints. I put up an exhibit of the framed photos at the University of Arizona in Tucson, as well as in the Balboa Theater lobby in San Francisco after I moved there. After many attempts to sell this collection nationally, I was glad to negotiate a deal with CSWR in 2011.

That Karl was living and working in Santa Fe and northern New Mexico in the 1960s and 70s and was part of the vibrant arts community, as well as the environmental and social justice movements, yielded many images not captured by many others. He documented Reies Tijerina’s turbulent political activities, the Poor People’s March to Washington, the Black Mesa coal strip-mining debacle, and Taos communal living, among other current political and social events. As an example of the enduring value of his work, I was contacted in 2014 by the New York Times for permission to use one of Karl’s photos of Dennis Hopper supporting the Hopi people in a 1976 environmental dispute.

The pictures he took while we were in Japan were largely family-centered, on slide film, and I still have yet to determine if any of these images have a wider audience. I had framed several enlargements of our daughter and other children in the public kindergarten, where he documented many daily routines and special occasions. These were displayed in several exhibits, and when I left the San Francisco Bay Area in 2019 I gave them to the very appreciative San Mateo Japanese American Community Center.  

I have handled all this with the time it needed to see that his work was appropriately preserved, being careful, thorough, and methodical. I felt a profound responsibility, not only to Karl personally, but to the public, respecting his approach to any project or job, doing it as well as possible. There were certainly times when I felt overwhelmed with the task, but I simply attended to other demands for some period of time and then returned to it when I had the focused energy.

In 2021 I was finally able to inventory over 3000 35mm transparencies and scanned over 1200 representative images. I negotiated a purchase and donation of these with the new director of UNM’s CSWR, Tomas Jaehn. They are making these digitized images available as they have resources available.

In 2024 the Museum of New Mexico’s History Museum Photo Archives was able to digitize his entire contact sheet collection, making the images from his extensive negative collection accessible.

This is essentially the completion of my 28-year odyssey to secure Karl’s photographic legacy. I’ve undertaken this labor of love because I’ve felt responsible to make sure his stunning and expansive oeuvre is in archival hands and available to the public. Though I must say, it has actually been a privilege to handle his work. Besides, I really have enjoyed examining his images, identifying and organizing them, and working with dedicated archival professionals!

I’ve now built this basic website, Kernberger.com with some help from my talented daughter Serafina Kernberger. We hope you enjoy the fruits of our labors!