A PHOTOGRAPHIC JOURNEY

 

The Sierra Tarahumara of Northern México is named for the people who have lived there for centuries. The Tarahumara to outsiders. In their own language they are the Rarámuri, or foot runners.

The largest indigenous group North of México City with the exception of the Navajo, they are also the least affected by the outside world. Perhaps because they can run so fast, so tirelessly far. For hundreds of years they have run from countless invaders who would alter their culture, tame their wildness, sanitize their animistic view of the world they live in. A view perfectly suited to the powerful physical presence of their home, Las Barrancas del Cobre, the Copper Canyon.

Here, three rivers have cut four main gorges or barrancas, to create a system of 20 interconnecting canyons of immense proportions that are in places more than 6,000 feet deep. At least five canyons are longer and deeper than the Grand Canyon of Arizona. Within this mystical landscape live the nomadic Tarahumara, growing their corn and beans and squash while herding their goats in the sierra from April to October, many still wintering in the warmth and lushness of the barrancas below. Living much as their ancestors in modified caves and simple stone and rough-hewn timber dwellings they share parts of the sierra with Mestizo farming families, weathering decade long droughts without electricity or running water.

To be in the Sierra Tarahumara is to walk back in time - to gaze through the lens of a magical looking glass - to witness an ancient culture still surviving within an overwhelming and unpralleled landscape, in places bountiful and mothering and in places harsh and threatened by outside forces. On numerous expeditions since my first visit I have traveled by foot and horseback to discover and photograph the physical and spiritual worlds that exist there. I have come to love and respect the Tarahumara and Mestizo people who accept and embrace their world of few material rewards and cling to a life rich in tradition, family and sharing. On countless ocassions I have been treated with kindness and generosity by those who have very little and owe me nothing.

It has been a gift to be within this holy place and to come to know these wonderful and inspiring people. I am eternally grateful for the privilege of photographing them and their mother mountains, and these images are my tribute. Change, though not always for the better, is inevitable and the Sierra Tarahumara is not immune. It is my hope, therefore that these photographs will convey some impression of this fragile and vulnerable world and possibly help to preserve in time the magic that powerful forces conspire even now to alter forever. These forces - human, political and otherwise - may succeed in some measure, but they will never subdue the entities that inhabit every rock, every tree, every shadow of this timeless and magical place.