Photography in an ancient power spot
Where did they come from?
The American Southwest is a dry place, filled with sand and sage, cholla
and sandstone. Indians hunted, gathered, and dry-farmed there for
centuries. Around 300 CE or so, someone decided to dig circular holes
near their farm fields and start roofing them over. It was a lot warmer
than sleeping in the open, and more convenient than caves - caves weren't
always around anyway.
By 700, those pit houses had grown into small adobe pueblos of
rectangular rooms in front of the circular chamber, a true community.
That circular chamber morphed into a kiva, the focus of ceremonies
shared by the whole pueblo. Archeologist Earl Morris restored a Great Kiva at Aztec Ruins National Monument in the 1920s. It looks like this inside. Some present-day archeologists think the walls are too high, but there's no way to know for sure.
Near the center of the San Juan Basin in Chaco Canyon, someone gathered
enough influence by 850 to start building a D-shaped structure of
sandstone bricks, quarried from the Canyon's mesas. If you've been to
Chaco, you know there aren't any big trees there. Logs for building
supports had to be cut and transported by muscle power from the Chuska
Mountains, many miles west of Chaco.
The Canyon is an unlikely place for a ceremonial center - less than 9
inches of annual rainfall, only a few deer and rabbits to hunt,
turquoise for ceremonial beads and statues at mines far to the east. But there are other reasons for any location. The jungle seems like an
inconvenient place for the ancient Khmer capitol of Angkor Wat, but it
was where the Khmer rulers ended up after moving several times. Those
rulers compelled slaves to quarry sandstone many miles away in
Cambodia's Kulen Hills and transport it to build Angkor's temples. For
Khmer kings, temple-building seemed like the best way to gain merit,
build positive karma, and ensure a good connection with ruling
ancestors. It was hard on slaves.
Chaco's central location and its east-west and southern sight lines may
have helped it become a ceremonial center. We don't know.
By early 1100, Pueblo Bonito had become the 4-storied D-shaped building
uncovered in the late 1800s. Its walls were made of massive cut and dressed sandstone bricks, with long-gone plaster veneer.
Pueblo Bonito and several other Great Houses must have been an
impressive sight for pilgrims descending the Jackson Stairs from Pueblo
Alto into the canyon after a trek along the Great North Road.
When did they leave?
But something happened - the dream began to fade in the 1200s. By 1350,
the original residents had ritually burned Pueblo Bonito's Great Kiva, bricked up
doorways, and left.
No more pilgrims walked the Great North Road. Everybody gradually
migrated out to the Hopi mesas, Zuni, the Rio Grande pueblos, Acoma. The
Chaco System ended.
Today, you still see the structures first excavated by Richard
Wetherill in 1896.
Getting there
Be ready for the dirt road into Chaco. The first 10
miles from Nageezi are paved, but it's another ten miles of dirt (dry)
or muck (wet and icy) after that. You can enter from Grants to the
south, but that road isn't any better. December in Chaco
isn't too cold, and the tourists are mostly gone. Summers see
100-degree temperatures, and there aren't any gas stations, cafeterias or other signs of mechanized civilization
in the Canyon or on the way in. All you see are occasional hogans or flocks
of Navaho sheep. Watch for the windmill near the Canyon.
Once you get there, you'll need good hiking boots to navigate trails -
if there have been recent storms, running shoes won't do it.
Photography - Ruins Are Architecture
Past the "Oh, wow" factor, most of Chaco photography is architectural. Ultra-wide lenses will make ruin interiors look huge, but they may be needed to show Great Kivas. I include other features for a sense of scale in Great Kiva shots, like nearby walls and background mountains. There may be no way to do this with a ruin's picked-clean interiors. For those, I use a normal 50mm lens or moderate wide like a 24mm (medium-wide view on EOS 1D) and pick a single feature - a doorway or window. Then I find a way to lead the viewer's eye through the composition. Parallel doorways and windows work well for this. Cliff views out windows work too.
Avoid tilted vertical lines in ruins and tilting horizons unless you want them in your pictures. A small level you can fit in your camera's accessory shoe will help keep things straight. I use focusing screens with grid patterns to compare to vertical and horizontal details. Canon doesn't make interchangeable screens for the EOS Rebel-10D-20D-30D-40D-50D cameras. Katz Eye Optics offers reasonably-priced screens with grids and old-fashioned focusing aids your camera tech can put into any of these cameras. Canon makes gridded focusing screens for its 1D-series cameras.
I also like sharp foreground textures with ruin masonry dominating the middleground. In the picture, I give the viewer's eye a path from weeds to ruin to background, with adobe bricks rising through stark white snow textures. Snow should have texture - it's easy to blow it into featureless white.
On a small-format dSLR, you'll need an ultra-wide prime or zoom for great kivas, something wide to mid-range for masonry and pueblo interiors, and a 70-200mm for distant ruins and scenery from trails, especially on North Mesa. I used a Leica M8 with 21mm, 35mm and 50mm lenses, plus Canon EOS 1D mk
II with 16-35mm and 70-200mm lenses to photograph Chaco's ruins in December
2008. On earlier visits I used an EOS 1D (original) and
EOS 10D with 16-35mm, 24-70mm, and 70-200mm lenses, or scanned from slide film (Ektachrome and Kodachrome, ISO 64, 100, and 400 - Nikon N90 and F5 with similar lenses).
A tilt-shift or PC lens would be handy to correct perspective (I forgot to bring my 24mm
TS-E lens on my most recent trip to Chaco). If you want to capture the moon
through a ruin window at dusk, you'll need a tripod.
For more on the solar and lunar astronomy of Fajada Butte and the
Chacoan Great Houses, see work by Anna Sofaer and the Solstice Project.
For discussions of the ceremonial and political aspects of the Chaco
System, see Stephen Lekson's The Chaco Meridian.
Kendrick Frazier's People of Chaco (3rd edition) gives a good
introduction to the what and whys of Chaco. Frank McNitt's Richard Wetherill: Anasazi is a good biography about the discoverer of Mesa
Verde and first excavator of Chaco. | 
