The eldest child in a ranching family who had come to Colorado Springs from the East Coast, Laura Gilpin viewed the West as a region with an enduring and complex history rather than a frontier awaiting discovery. This view would come to define her photographic work, which began when she was given a camera as a child. Her images of the Southwest, ranging from archaeological slides to contrast-driven close-ups of cactus spines and waves of sand, depict the permanence of the desert landscape in soft platinum print tones she thought best expressed the subtlety of her subject matter.

Gilpin's favorite subject later in her career was the Southwestern Navajo and Pueblo peoples, whom she photographed with a sensitive eye absent in the previous photography of Native Americans. Her interest in the Navajo began when on a trip to photograph some remote ruins on the Navajo reservation she and her companion ran out of gas and were assisted by a succession of friendly locals. She relocated to the reservation in 1950, and spent the next 18 years researching and photographing the book The Enduring Navajo, a volume of photographs lauded for its accurate and compassionate portrayal of Navajo life in the 1950s and 1960s.

Prizes: Pictorial Photographers of America, 1929; New Mexico State Annual Award for Excellence in the Arts, 1974; Guggenheim Fellowship, 1975.

Exhibited: Pictorial Photographers of America, 1929.

Works Held: University of Arizona; University of Kansas; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Museum of New Mexico; New Orleans Museum of Art; Oakland Museum of Art; Princeton University; Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth; Center for Creative Photography, Arizona.

Member: Denver Artist's Guild

Publications: The Pueblos: A Camera Chronicle (1941), Temples in Yucatán: A Camera Chronicle of Chichen Itza (1948), The Rio Grande: River of Destiny (1949), The Enduring Navajo (1987), The Early Work of Laura Gilpin (1917-1932), Land Beyond Maps (2009).