In the summer of 1972, a 22-year-old kid with bright eyes and Gordon Lightfoot hair whipped his Volkswagen Squareback out of a Durham, North Carolina, driveway and drove west—west across the Mississippi River, west through the Texas Panhandle, west to Santa Fe, then up the spectacularly sinuous High Road and into the pocket-size village of Peñasco. The kid’s name was Alex Harris, and he was moving to Peñasco on assignment to take pictures of the village elders, or ancianos, for a book.
How could the kid, a fish-out-of-water gringo in a traditional Hispano town, have known that his days in northern New Mexico would turn into years? Or that the pictures he would make in Peñasco and a handful of nearby villages would end up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in New York; the Getty Center, in Los Angeles; and the New Mexico Museum of Art, in Santa Fe? How could he have known that his time living in the shadows of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains would shape the course of his life—job, family, the very way he looked at the world? And how could he possibly have guessed that exactly half a century later, after retiring as a professor of documentary
