Boosterism, Broken Narratives, and What the Camera Sells: The Thomas Mullarky Collection in the Photo Archives at the New Mexico History Museum

[Opening strum of Spanish guitar music]

[00:00:00] David Correia: Mullarky: I was trying to figure out who this guy was and like what motivated him to take the kind of photos he took, because even though he definitely fits in to the category of a frontier photographer, definitely engaging in this sort of boosterism, definitely monetizing these photos of Native People for his own purposes, he couldn’t help himself.

[00:00:18] And he ended up taking some of the most remarkable photos I’ve seen of this time period, in ways that really undermined the establishment story of ‘Come to New Mexico to see real Native People before they die.’ And, Mullarky certainly took photos that contributed to that, but he couldn’t help himself, and he took these photos that ended up telling a much different story.

[00:00:39] Emily Withnall: ¡Bienvenidos! This is Encounter Culture from the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. I’m your host, and editor of El Palacio magazine, Emily Withnall.

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[00:00:51] I first met David Correia in the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives at the New Mexico History Museum. 

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[00:00:59] Emily: He had pitched me a story about the Gallup Coal Wars and said he had access to never-before-seen photographs of the dramatic events that took place in Gallup between 1933 and 1935. I was intrigued and arranged to meet him at the archives where the Thomas Mullarky Photo Collection had recently been donated, so I could see the photos firsthand.

[00:01:23] I don’t know what I was expecting, but Mullarky’s cinematic, and unconventional images raised more questions than they answered. After we met, David did write an article for El Palacio about the Gallup Coal Wars. You can find a link to the article, and the Mullarky photos that accompany it, in the show notes.

[00:01:45] But for the purposes of our conversation on Encounter Culture, I wanted to dig into who Mullarky was, what he was doing in Gallup, and what we can know from looking at his photos.

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[00:02:00] As the editor of El Palacio magazine, I spend a lot of time thinking about history: what we know, how we know these histories, and whose perspective these histories reflect. Since I began my tenure as editor, and as host of Encounter Culture, I’ve been very interested in the process of identifying and bringing to light the lesser-known histories in New Mexico.

[00:02:26] This isn’t an easy task. A lot of the time I spend thinking about history, I am thinking about what I don’t know: what is missing from the archive and why? Uncovering history across New Mexico is a little like putting together an enormous jigsaw puzzle, without having a reference image or all of the pieces.

[00:02:50] In fact, it’s impossible to know how many pieces there are. Although this might sound like a fool’s errand, the process of unearthing previously-unknown stories and perspectives does help to bring the fuller picture of the state’s story into sharper focus. And importantly, it leads to more questions, which lead to more research.

[00:03:13] As you will hear in my conversation with David Correia, Mullarky’s unusual photographs of various events in Gallup in the 1930s upend traditional frontier photography, and present new avenues for research. 

[00:03:30] Welcome David, to Encounter Culture. Thank you for joining me today. 

[00:03:34] David Correia: Thanks for having me, Emily. I’m glad to be here.

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[00:03:36] Emily Withnall: I want to start off by having you introduce yourself, what you do, what your areas of interest and expertise are in terms of your research and your books that you’ve been writing. 

[00:03:47] David Correia: I’m a writer and a professor at The University of New Mexico. I’ve, for the last seventeen years, I’ve been at UNM. I’m currently in the Department of Geography and Environmental Studies.

[00:03:56] I’m an historical geographer, so most of the stuff that I write about focuses on the past. I have a couple books focused on New Mexico’s history, particularly the colonial history in New Mexico, but I’ve also written about, more recently, labor history, particularly stories about strikes and conflicts between workers and bosses.

[00:04:17] And my work is, I would say, a bit unusual. It’s not the kind of geography that most people think of when they imagine what a geographer is, or what a geographer does. I spend my time in the archives, and that’s where the stories I write about come from mostly. 

[00:04:30] Emily Withnall: I like that you said that because that’s where we met. We met at the—(laughs)

[00:04:33] David Correia: We met in the archives! 

[00:04:30] Emily Withnall: Yes. We met in the archives, at the Palace of Governors archives to talk about Thomas Mullarky’s photos from the 1930s. And you wrote an article for the fall issue of El Palacio that touched on some of his photos. So I want to talk about all of his photos today, but can you give listeners just a teaser of the article?

[00:04:54] David Correia: Oh, sure. Yeah. The piece in El Palacio is a story about maybe one of the most dramatic labor struggles in U.S. history in the twentieth century. The 1933 to 1935 Gallup Coal War is a really remarkable story. It was a strike by coal miners in Gallup. The governor declared martial law, sent in the troops, shut down Gallup for months.

[00:05:17] There was this incredible backlash against the miners. They eschewed the United Mine Workers, who they thought were too conservative and treated them poorly in a previous strike, and went with a communist union that was affiliated with the Soviet Union. This is kind of like, a prehistory of the Red Scare as well.

[00:05:33] And the story tells, really the full arc of the story that concludes with the assassination of the McKinley County Sheriff in 1935, and the crackdown that happens after that, and all the arrests and deportations that occurred. I mean, they were arresting miners and just putting them on trains and just sending them right across the border of New Mexico, deporting them.

[00:05:52] They were arresting organizers and evicting them from the State of New Mexico. It’s really a pretty dramatic story, but we didn’t really have to worry too much about capturing the drama and text, ’cause the photos are really remarkable. And, as you mentioned at the beginning, the photos come from the William Thomas Mullarky photo collection, which is now available at the New Mexico History Museum Photo Archive, which was just donated a little over a year ago, actually, which is how I came to start working with them. And I guess in some ways the story of the Thomas Mullarky Collection begins with the Gallup Coal War, ’cause the photos are so remarkable. 

[00:06:26] Emily Withnall: Right, right. But, and before you dive into that, I just want to say, to listeners, you know, sometimes I have mentioned various articles in this issue, and I’ll talk about the Gallup Coal Wars, and I’ll see people—like their eyes glaze over a little bit (laughs). Because, that kind of a history, unless you’re really into history, doesn’t sound interesting on the surface. But I just want to tell listeners that this is very dynamically written.

[00:06:51] If there are any TV producers who want to turn this into a TV series, (chuckles) that was my first thought when I read, the first draft that David sent me. So it’s definitely very gripping. There’s a lot of drama and action in this story. 

[00:07:04] David Correia: Yeah, no. And also incredible figures. I mean, I remember I wrote a part of a draft that you told me to get rid of, was the kind of the bio of the Adjutant General of New Mexico, Osborne Wood, who, his story’s incredible. His dad was this famous war hero, Leonard Wood. And, there was so much interesting about it, even some of the most interesting stuff, just didn’t find its way into the story. And Mullarky, the photographer of the Coal War, is probably the most interesting, and he didn’t figure in at all.

[00:07:31] So that’s why we’re here though. We’re going to talk about that. 

[00:07:34] Emily Withnall: That’s why we’re here. Yes, exactly! And before we dive into his history, I actually want to know, what do you know about photographers in the West during this time and what their role was in their communities? Or specific to Gallup, if you want to go there, but what were they doing in these camera shops?

[00:07:49] ’Cause you wouldn’t necessarily—I wouldn’t necessarily associate a camera shop owner with, like, being on the ground during dramatic political events.

[00:07:58] David Correia: Yeah, I think Mullarky was unique in some respects. He was unique, but there was a certain role played in the early twentieth century by these camera shop owners in, like, frontier towns.

[00:08:08] And I think if anyone is familiar with photography in the West or the Southwest, they’re familiar with some names like Edward Sheriff Curtis, and others like him. And so Mullarky does fit in that category to some degree. He’s not known at all. And partly that’s a result of the fact that his photos were just embargoed really until the, I think this is the first time his photos have appeared in print in El Palacio.

[00:08:28] But photographers like Edward Schiff Curtis and others were, you know, like we’re talking about late 19th century, early twentieh century photography. Photography as a field was like, wasn’t very common. There weren’t a lot of people that could engage in it. It was a technical enterprise that required some investment, some training.

[00:08:47] So there weren’t a lot of people that knew how to take photos. It cost quite a bit to have to, to haul that equipment around and to develop film. When you look at photos, particularly from the U.S. Southwest in the late ninetheeth century, early twentieth century, they tend to fit into a category of what photography historians would call frontier photography.

[00:09:06] There’s the landscape shots, this idea of this like open, empty landscape ready for white settlers to inhabit. And then the photos like Edward Sheriff Curtis took, and also Mullarky took, of Native people. And often those photos contribute to the kind of like, frontier aesthetic of American expansion and American exceptionalism, which depicted Native people usually as like one of two things: either obstacles to progress, or victims of progress—or as romantic objects for tourist exploration, which is sort of one of the roles that Mullarky filled. And so, you wouldn’t think these like small town camera shop owners would be a part of that project, but they were actually the heart of the project because they made their money in multiple ways.

[00:09:53] You know, one was portraits when people first started having their portraits taken, so they would come to these camera shops to have their portraits taken. Camera shop owners like Mullarky did sell film and did sell equipment, but there, that wasn’t a very lucrative part of his business. Almost all camera shop owners in the early twentieth century in towns out west made a lot of money as like boosters, right? There was some sort of, whatever the town booster like aesthetic was, they were, they were at the heart of it. So a lot of Mullarky’s clients were local business owners who were advertising in the paper and Mullarky took photos of their businesses or street scenes.

[00:10:25] So there’s a lot of street scenes; photos of buildings in Gallup from the early 20th century. 

[00:10:30] Emily Withnall: Yeah. And I actually want to have you say like, who was he? And, how did he end up in Gallup? 

[00:10:36] David Correia: I want to go through all that. Okay. And I wanna preface it by saying like, we’re going to eventually get to describing some of his photos and they’re really what’s worth.

[00:10:42] Yes. So if anyone listening, just wait till we get to the part. This all makes sense because I, I think it is important to know who this character was and how he got there. So, yeah, he was not from New Mexico. Mullarky was born in the late 1800s; 1897. He was, in the early twentieth century, working with, like, an Imperial Valley photographer named Leo Hetzel, who he did a lot of like, surfer photos and Hetzel was there at the beginning of urbanization in the Imperial Valley in California.

[00:11:11] And like Mullarky after him, and all the photo, photographers that came before him, you know, he was documenting this sort of settlement of the West and the Native people that they were displacing. And so that’s where Mullarky was trained. This was just like an occupation, right? It’s like the uh, camera shop owner. 

[00:11:28] And the camera shop owners, the way they made most of their money was by monetizing the photos they took. So in addition to like portraits, in addition to clients, like local businessmen, and whatever sales they would have in their shop, they would take photos of the, the surrounding landscape or Native People and then they would monetize those. The obvious way to monetize it was postcards or attaching yourself to some sort of promotional or tourist event.

[00:11:51] And so Gallup becomes a really lucrative place for all of this. Mullarky is, like, actually the third camera shop owner in Gallup. The first is this Brother, Simeon Schwemberger, who starts taking photos with the equipment at the St. Michael’s Mission in Arizona in like 1902. Decides he doesn’t like being a Brother anymore, which was just a lot of drudgery and like cleaning and cooking.

[00:12:16] So he leaves the order and buys a camera shop, opens a camera shop in Gallup in like 1909 I think. And actually there’s a, UNM press published a book of his photos, Simeon Schwemberger’s. It’s called Big Eyes, and they kind of, the photos are interesting. He was a portraitist, first and foremost. He wasn’t an artist.

[00:12:36] The goal wasn’t art, it was commerce. Like, he was trying to monetize the photos he took. He’s the one that starts developing these photos into postcards as like, car traffic. He becomes an Indian trader, like a lot of white settlers, businessmen do. And so he sells his camera shop to a guy named J.R. Willis.

[00:12:54] J.R. Willis—I don’t know if anyone’s familiar with that famous photograph of New Mexico, and multicolored, where it’s like the big block letters: “New Mexico.” That’s J.R. Willis’ design and his photo is in the background. And he was like a prolific photographer who, he was a painter also, and Willis was in Gallup doing portraits and taking photos, and monetizing all of this until, I guess it was about nineteen—the early twenties, 1920s.

[00:13:18] And Mullarky had come west. He couldn’t, you know, he wanted his own studio. He wanted to leave California, and so he was just driving through New Mexico and he stops. And there’s multiple stories. Many of these are myths because there’s not a lot of information on Mullarky because his photos have been embargoed for so long. But he ends up buying, um, Willis’s studio and he gets to New Mexico at least for someone with his interest at the right time.

[00:13:41] At the time Gallup was just beginning its Intertribal Gallup Ceremonial. So the Gallup Intertribal Ceremonial is a powwow. It happens in late summer. I think the first one was in like 1921. So right about the time that Mullarky arrives and it was a tourist event owned and run by the Chamber of Commerce designed to attract tourists to New Mexico by attracting Native People from all over the West and Southwest to come and engage in performances. And at the time it was like, it was a kind of a rough event, but most of the photos in Mullarky’s collection aren’t of the Gallup Coal War that I write about in El Palacio. But instead, most of them are photos he took during the Intertribal Ceremonial, various years.

[00:14:25] And there are thousands of photos lost. There’s probably more that have been lost than are in the collection because there was a flood in the seventies in the studio that they lost a lot of his photos. But you know, he was a member of the Chamber of Commerce. He was a local booster. He actually served on the, the organizing committee for the intertribal ceremonial, but he was also its official photographer.

(ragtime paino music begins faintly in the background)

[00:14:44] And then he would monetize all this by putting them on postcards and selling them to the tourists that came every year for the event.

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[00:15:03] Emily Withnall: So how did you first learn about this collection, and what drew you to it? And I understand you were pursuing it and couldn’t access it until relatively recently. 

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[00:15:13] David Correia: I’m sure I’m one of many people over the years, uh, historians and other scholars who’ve tried to get their hands on these photos. I think it was almost twenty years ago, I was in the Center for Southwest Research at the University of New Mexico campus in the archives, and I was working on my first book, which was a book about the Tiera Mira Land Grant. And I don’t know how I got into the collection of these photos, but they have a small collection there of about a dozen of Mullarky’s pictures from, that are just on the coal strike from 1933 to 1935.

[00:15:46] And at the time, I was unfamiliar with that story, that history. There’s really not a lot written about New Mexico’s labor history, particularly that’s sort of radical labor history, like the National Miners Union that I write about in El Palacio, which is this really radical labor union that was openly communist and organizing mostly non-English-speaking miners at the time.

[00:16:07] And the photos just blew me away. It’s hard to do it justice over the air. I mean, you have to see these photos. They’re really remarkable. But Mullarky was a portraitist and he somehow, like brought that aesthetic out of the studio so that his street scenes, and scenes of like marching soldiers, and scenes of like hired goons with guns, like rounding up miners, they all look like portraits somehow.

[00:16:34] Like it’s just really remarkable. I just saw these photos. I was like, I’ve never seen photos this amazing. I mean, they just brought to life—as you said, like you’ve told people like, “Oh, you should read this story about the Gallup Coal Strike,” and people’s eyes like glaze over. And you see the photos, you’re now, your eyes are not going to glaze over you.

[00:16:49] You’re like, “What’s happening here?” Also, like photos of the organizers. The young woman who was the primary organizer of the strike, Martha Roberts, twenty-one years old. There’s these great photos of her, like in the middle of a crowd, just like, like standing in front of hundreds and hundreds of people holding their attention and like giving these rousing speeches.

[00:17:07] And she organized thousands of people in this short time before they deported her. And he captured all of it. Like he was there for all of it. Usually when you find a photo collection in an archive, the archive owns the copyright and, and usually for like a scholar who’s doing some sort of academic project, the cost of using photos is negligible.

[00:17:26] It just covers their expenses, like $25 a photo or something like that. But they didn’t own copyright. They just had the name and number of the guy who did. Mullarky died in 1959, and I guess in 1960 his family or estate sold the camera shop and all of his photos that he had taken his entire life to this family, the Guadagnoli, I don’t know if I’m pronouncing that name correctly, actually. Anyone from Gallup that’s listening, my apologies. And he never ever let anyone use the photos. So I called him and he, I explained who I was and that I wanted to inquire about whether or not I could use these photos in a future book project.

[00:18:03] And I explained that it would be like, with an academic press, “No one’s out to make money,” you know, and he, I don’t, I don’t remember the number he quoted me, but it was thousands of dollars per photo that he wanted. It would escalate too if, like, depending on the sales. Like he wanted a cut of sales and like he wanted like all this money and I was just like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

[00:18:22] Emily Withnall: Yeah. 

[00:18:23] David Correia: I’ve never in my life, I mean, and I’ve, I’ve published six books and I, there’s photos and all these books, and I’ve had conversations with so many people about copyright, and using permissions for photos, and I was just shocked because the photos are so amazing. Why would you not want these photos displayed?

So there was just no way that I could pay that. 

[00:18:40] Emily Withnall: Did he say why he didn’t want— 

[00:18:41] David Correia: He was pretty gruff. (Emily chuckles) He was like, this, this, he was this—he struck me as a kind of like, yeah, I was like. It was like it was bothering him, you know. He was just like, “What’s this guy wanting?” Like, no, he’s a, it was like he just quoted me a figure and when I said no, he was like, “Okay, bye.”

[00:18:55] I mean, I just gave up. I was like, “Whatever,” you know? And then about a year ago, I get a email from the archivist, the photo archivists in Santa Fe asking me if I’d like to come in. They’d just been gifted a photo collection about the Gallup Coal War, and they wanted to know if I would help them work through the collections toward publication of some sort. They wanted to do an exhibition. The guy who I talked to had passed away and the estate decided to sell them, and there was some sort of bidding war actually. The couple that bought it bought it specifically, I think for the same reason. They, they had must have had the same experience I’d had.

[00:19:29] They knew how amazing these photos were, and so they bought everything that existed that had survived over the years. It’s about twelve boxes, and they asked if I would come in because the couple that had donated it to the photo archive in Santa Fe donated under the condition that the archivists quickly process the collection, and find someone who will help them present the material through publication or exhibition or a book with a focus on the Gallup coal strike in particular. That’s actually why I pitched the idea to you about the Gallup Coal War. 

[00:20:00]  Emily: (chuckles) Right. 

[00:20:01] David Correia: Um, because that was part of the conditions. They, they, like me, were so struck by these photos that they wanted them out in the world and wanted people to see the photos and learned this history.

[00:20:11] So I drove up to Santa Fe to look at them and I spent a few months going through them because they hadn’t been, they were just plates, you know, like there were negatives. And so we had to, it was like kind of painstaking work just to be able to sort of make heads or tails out of all these photos. There were no notes.

[00:20:25] A few of them were dated, no names of people. And so, it took a while to go through them. And at first it was just identifying which are the ones from the coal strike. And as you know from reading the story of the coal strike, it’s really two stories. It’s the, it’s the strike. It’s 1933. And then it’s the backlash in ’35 after the killing of the sheriff, which they blamed on the striking miners at the roundup and all the violence against, um, the striking miners.

[00:20:50] The archivist in Santa Fe didn’t know that I was familiar with those, and I was like, “I think these are gonna be the,” and they were. I was like, “Oh my God.” So seventy of the photos in the collection are from the Gallup Coal War. We’re calling it a Coal War ’cause it’s not just a strike, it’s much large—it ends up becoming this huge sort of conflict between like working people, particularly like non-English speaking folks that had been brought to Gallup to work in the mines, and police, and local business leaders.

[00:21:17] But I went through the entire collection, and I was equally blown away by the rest of the material. And that’s what we should talk about, because the rest of the material is really incredible. I’ve spent the last year since getting in there really trying to immerse myself, not just in, you know, that time period in Gallup, but also like the context in which Mullarky would be taking photos and also Mullarky.

[00:21:39] I was trying to figure out who this guy was, and like, what motivated him to take the kind of photos he took. Because, even though he definitely fits into that kind of category of a frontier photographer, definitely engaging in this sort of boosterism, definitely monetizing these photos of Native people for his own purposes and for promotional purposes for the Intertribal Ceremonial, which didn’t serve the interest of native people, it served the interest of business leaders in Gallup.

[00:22:02] He couldn’t help himself and he ended up taking some of the most remarkable photos I’ve seen of this time period, like 1920s and thirties, in ways that really undermined the establishment story of like the white saviors and like, “Oh, come to New Mexico to see real native people before they die.”

[00:22:20] Like that’s the usual promotional story that drew tourists to New Mexico in the early twentieth century. “Come to this tourist event and you’ll be able to see real Native people. You’ll understand their life ways before this dying race of people forever disappears.” Like that was the kind of draw and the promotional pitch that made the Intertribal Ceremonial such a huge tourist event.

[00:22:42] And Mullarky certainly took photos that contributed to that theme, but he couldn’t help himself and he took these photos; just like he couldn’t help himself with the Gallup Coal War. Like he took photos that ended up telling a much different story, because his Coal Wars pictures don’t make the business elite come out looking all that well. (Emily and David laugh)

[00:22:58] His Coal War photos really celebrate working people’s struggles. And he was in no way, on paper, someone he would imagine would take photos like this. 

[00:23:10] Emily Withnall: So did you discover any answers or clues as to why he was spending this time and money undermining some of his other work? 

[00:23:17] David Correia: Well, I did figure out why he took the Gallup Coal War photos.

[00:23:21] He was hired by the court. Yeah, in the course of the story that I tell in El Palacio, as I mentioned, the sheriff was assassinated, and when I was reading in the archives, I found sort of, passages referencing Mullarky’s job to take crime scene photos. And I don’t know if you saw them, Emily, but there’s a series of photos in his collection that are very much like crime scene photos of just like, tire tracks on pavement.

[00:23:46] And I was like, “That’s a silly photo for Mullarky to take.” So it turns out he was hired to take photos right by the court and by the Sheriff’s department. That explains the 1935 photos after the Sheriff was assassinated. Again, a lot of records were lost and Guadagnoli never released a lot of records and they didn’t keep track of the photos very well.

[00:24:06] But my guess is that, and this is how most border town camera shop owners made their living, like, they were just hired by someone who needed photos taken, and they just asked—the only person in town with a camera is the camera shop owner. So he was hired to take these photos documenting the strike.

[00:24:20] Maybe the National Guard hired him or the court or the coal mine owners, but he couldn’t help himself. And he took these photos in ways that revealed the hypocrisy of the police crackdown and the, and the martial law. There were just three categories. I’ll give you examples of how he undermines it. One would be the way in which photography was understood and viewed by people at the time. Right. It was, you know, photography is a mediated activity. Like, you know, you and I looking at a photo are seeing whatever that photographer wanted us to see. Right? Like all the choices they make about who’s in this scene, who’s in the frame and who’s not, and where and how they take the photo.

[00:24:56] And Mullarky was a portraitist, so he was very careful about, like, scenes. Like one of the very funny photos, I mean, kind of funny photos in the Gallup Coal War is these two organizers who’d come to New Mexico to try to help the mine workers. And they’re kidnapped and beaten, and they’re bloodied, and Mullarky takes them into his studio and takes portraits of them as their heads are bleeding. It’s the strangest photo. (chuckles)

[00:25:18] Emily Withnall: It is the strangest photo. That is the photo that caught my attention first when I met with you in the archives, because of their, just goofy looks on their faces. 

[00:25:27] David Correia: They’re just posing in a studio, like smiling like anyone would in a portrait, while their heads are just bleeding and they’ve got like bandages everywhere 

[00:25:33] Emily Withnall: And bandages that you’re not sure how they’re attached to their heads. It’s very strange. (laughs)

[00:25:37] David Correia: And one of them is one of the most prominent like labor leaders in the U.S. at the time. So like, it’s like, “Wow, what is happening here?” At first I thought, “Oh well, you know, he’s just a portraitist and that’s what he knows, that’s what he does best. So he brings him into the studio.”

[00:25:50] But when I looked at the rest of the photos, like I saw something else. And so, when I’ve been in the archives, there’s two different things happening. When you look at photos from the Intertribal Ceremonial, that’s a carnival. It’s like this festival and like Native People are smiling and they’re having a great time and they’re performing and all you see is them, right, like them in their outfits in group shots, and individual shots, engaging in performance.

(traditional Native American music begins softly in the background)

[00:26:16] You don’t see the white people coming to look at them, like viewers would just see like, oh, these, these are like almost ethnographic in quality. Like Edward Sheriff Curtis appears to be like documenting Native people. But you know, like Edward Sheriff Curtis was bankrolled by JP Morgan. The whole point was money.

(as Correia continues speaking, the music shifts from Native music to ragtime piano behind his voice)

[00:26:32] That was the point with Mullarky too. I mean, like he’s only going to take photos that could be monetized in the form of promotional materials, or in the form of like postcards that tourists would buy when they came. And that was his job, right? They would come and he would sell them postcards and take pictures for money, but he couldn’t help himself and he took pictures of the tourists and it’s almost like pulling the curtain down.

[00:26:51] Like he takes these shots, street scenes of white people just like gawking at Native People, and it undermines the whole idea that it’s anything other than a, like a performance for tourists. It’s a tourist event, end of story. And his photos like totally reveal that.

(ragtime paino shifts to 1920s jazz) 

(ads begin)

[00:27:16] Emily Withnall: I have never made the pilgrimage to Chimayó that so many New Mexicans make each spring. But at the New Mexico History Museum last year, I could feel the power of the journey as I was immersed in the Chimayó exhibition filled with family photographs, baby shoes, and the sounds of voices, footsteps, and singing, swirling around me.

[00:27:40] Visitors at the New Mexico History Museum can expect to see exhibitions on a vast array of historical themes and topics across the state’s history. Visitors can also conduct research in the Fray Angélico Chávez Library, which houses the Palace of the Governors photo archive collection. The museum serves as a statewide educational resource and local landmark.

[00:28:04] It offers a welcoming place for visitors to explore multifaceted views on history, and dialogue that bridges social and cultural divides. Learn more at nmhistorymuseum.org. 

Some things you can find on the internet and others, not so much. Putting together a publication as interesting and beautiful as El Palacio magazine is hard work, but it’s well worth the effort.

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[00:29:23] David Correia: You know, another way in which he would undermine it. There’s a lot of photos that he takes that were probably the exact photos the organizing committee didn’t want anyone to take. If you read like 1930s, 1940s news articles and the Gallup Independent about the Intertribal Ceremonial, there’s often complaints, like the newspaper will complain about all these, like this is a common refrain, like this phrase, I’m not inventing this—

[00:29:47] The “drunk Indian,” right? All these “drunk Indians” in town throwing rocks at tourists. You’ll never find photos of this when it comes to the Gallup Ceremonial. They didn’t want that image depicted. It was supposed to be this tourist friendly event, but in reality, there was a lot of opposition to the Intertribal Ceremonial.

[00:30:05] I’ve written about the Intertribal Ceremonial in my book, An Enemy Such as This. Really, I thought, emerge in the sixties, like young Native activists in the 1960s were tired of their ceremonies and traditions being commodified and controlled by the Chamber of Commerce in Gallup, and they started protesting during the Ceremonial.

[00:30:22] I wrote about that, thinking at the time that this was the beginning of actual organized protests against it, but, from the beginning there were Native People that understood what was happening, didn’t want to have anything to do with it and opposed it in all kinds of ways. And one was they, as the Gallup Independent, wrote about, I think it was in the mid-thirties, they would like sit under the bleachers and throwing rocks at the tourists, you know, just to interrupt during these performances.

[00:30:46] And Mullarky has photos on the street of like all of this. I mean, that would fit in this sort of frontier photography aesthetic of like the victims of progress, right? There’s plenty of photos of like Native people, desperate, hungry, right? Or the “drunk Indian,” like Gallup has a long history of photos of “drunk Indians.”

[00:31:07] Usually when those photos contribute to the, like, frontier mythology of the West, there’s usually like a white person helping, you know, like, it’s like the white people. We’re just trying to help. These people are, for no reason of our own are, and you know, “we’re going to try to help” in Mullarky’s photos.

[00:31:22] He’s just pictures of white people stepping over Native people on the sidewalk. Like he turns the lens on those; then people don’t care. Like, you know, “These are not the Indians I want, I’m here for,” so they’re stepping over them. They’re ignoring them. There’s a real kind of gritty edge to his photos.

[00:31:36] Like those frontier photographs are really idealized versions of this American myth about the frontier. His aren’t, there’s nothing idealized. I mean, he does do the idealized versions in his like official photos for the Gallup Ceremony, which is what’s so interesting about Mullarky. Like he could tow the company line, but then he was like, I can’t help it.

[00:31:55] I’m going to turn the camera on what these tourists are really doing. If you were Native in the thirties and forties and fifties in Gallup, you were only welcome to the Gallup Intertribal Ceremonial. If you were a performer, they didn’t want you as a tourist, you didn’t have any money, like you are not welcome.

[00:32:10] He has these amazing photos of the ceremonial, like from a distance, these beautiful landscape shots where he is up on a bluff looking down during the ceremonial. But unlike a lot of the photos that you see from the West, he like mediates it by putting Native people in the foreground. So he has these pictures of Native people excluded from the ceremony.

[00:32:28] So he’s taken images from their perspective. They’re in the camera, but not their faces, like they’re looking down where they’re excluded from into this huge ceremony grounds. And so, on the one hand, it’s just like, it’s a beautiful photo in that it captures everything that the intertribal, ceremonial organizers would want.

[00:32:44] Right? The sort of scope of it and the scale of it, but it captures it from a perspective that they were not trying to promote, right? It was just the idea of exclusion. They don’t seem to be political photos in the sense that he, he’s also like really cares about this aesthetic. So his photos are beautiful.

[00:33:01] They’re not just like, they have a point of view sometimes that appear to be his own, but they’re also just beautiful. Like he has this ability to take street scenes of like really chaotic events and make them appear as though they’ve been posed. That comes, I think, mostly into like view when he takes photos of the organizers of the Intertribal Ceremony itself.

[00:33:23] So. It was run by white businessmen. That was, the Intertribal ceremony was always a Chamber of Commerce event owned by white businessmen. Mullarky was one of them, like he was one of the white businessmen who was like one of the organizers when I was looking through all of the photos of his collection, he has a lot of photos of the white men who are, you know, the president or the various organizers of the event. And usually they’re like the kind of photos that those guys probably wanted taken of them, like them introducing Native people or introducing ceremonies in front of the grandstand. 

[00:33:54] But every now and then he’s got these photos of those like smoking cigars in back rooms, whispering in each other’s ears, like he can’t help but like display, like something going on behind the scenes. And I spent a lot of time like, “Who are these guys?” And when I would, was able to figure out who they were by comparing photos. They were all of the like wealthiest people in Gallup.

[00:34:12] And they’re just like, cigar in their mouth whispering each other’s ears with Native people in the background. It’s fascinating. And you know, one of the other things he did too, which I’ve never seen in the sort of early 1920s and thirties from these kind of photography, was admit that these were like mediated, like he turned his camera on himself.

[00:34:29] Not specifically, he wasn’t taking selfies. Like that would, although that would be interesting if he had, I’ve only ever seen one photo of him, actually, it’s him and his camera shop, like posing with all of his employees. Like, you know, he would be on the street, and he would take photos on the street ’cause a lot of the Intertribal Ceremonial was happening on the street. There were parades and the whole point was like to sell stuff to tourists. So. There was like the traders, the Indian traders were the ones who profited the most from the ceremonial because tourists would come and they would buy Indian art.

[00:34:55] And the Indian art was sold to them by white traders. And so he’s taking pictures on the street of white traders selling Indian art to white people like, so there’s like no Native people involved, just their art, but. He’d also take pictures of Native people on the street, just like almost quick portraits on the street.

[00:35:11] And then he would take a picture of someone else taking a picture of the same person. So, he wasn’t the only photographer. But he was just like immediately like forcing a viewer who had never encountered photography or ever maybe had never thought about like, what does it mean to take this person’s portrait?

[00:35:27] You know: “I’m looking at this picture of this person. What does it mean that I’m looking at this photo? Like what is intended here? What am I supposed to think about this person?” All you can think when you see the next photo is like, “Oh, I was supposed to think they’re on display.” They’re just an object for someone to take a picture and monetize ’cause all those photos appeared in, you could just go to the camera shop and buy the postcard or, or go to the, where the Indian traders were selling the like Native art. They were buying cheap and selling for more expensive. So it’s also like he’s refusing to disguise the political economy under all of this.

[00:36:00] Like it’s just this big business conference. You know? This is like, it’s a scheme if they’re just trying to make a buck. I mean that, that was the whole point. I mean, you can’t see the photos and not suspect that Mullarky was either like too good a photographer to stop himself from doing that. I think that’s part of it.

[00:36:17] He was in a line of work that was fully a business. He was not an artist. The art was not a part of the equation, but he was an artist and he saw things and wanted to depict them for what they were and couldn’t help himself, and then went to the trouble of like developing these things, like, which would not have been cheap, had no monetary value.

[00:36:38] In fact, probably would’ve undermined his position in the community if he like displayed these. I mean. I don’t know how he got away with taking the photos that he took during the Gallup Coal War because the backlash against the miners and the Miners Union was so strong. I mean, they were deporting people who were American citizens.

[00:36:52] I mean the governor of New Mexico, a Democrat, called in the National Guard against working people who were just trying to form a union and then were arrested their organizers, U.S. citizens, and kicked them out of the state of New Mexico and the district court in New Mexico like agreed, “Yes, we should evict them from New Mexico.”

[00:37:08] They have every right to do that. The governor can do that if he wants. He took photos that undermine all of this that made it clear like this is, this is something not right here. And it, you know, for his entire life. And afterwards, they’ve been just hidden in a basement in Gallup by a guy who thought he could get tons of money.

[00:37:24] I mean, I should, we should probably not condemn Guadagnoli, if that’s not how to pronounce his name too bad. Because he was just doing what camera shop owners have always done, which is like, if you’ve taken these photos, the whole point of taking the photos was to monetize them. And you get as much money as you can for them, which is what he was trying to do, but he got nothing for them until he died and they were donated.

[00:37:59] Emily Withnall: But at this point, they’re historical artifacts, and I really was intrigued by what you were saying about how any photograph is mediated by the photographer. We see what they want us to see, and that’s true of any art. That’s true of this podcast, but, I am curious if you can talk a little bit about that in terms of these photos providing a window into a very specific time period, very specific place: What they tell us, what they give us access to, now that they are accessible to the public and like, what are the missing pieces still, what are we not seeing? What are, what are the questions that you still have after spending so much time with them? 

[00:38:41] David Correia: I mean, I have nothing but questions. I just, there’s so many questions. I still really don’t know much about Mullarky. His biography is just like, is this out-of-town businessman came to Gallup to make a buck, to make a living, just to, you know. Why do his photos capture? I mean, first of all, it makes me wonder about, like, there must be hidden archives of incredible photos documenting American life in the early 20th century that we are just—they’re hidden from us, right?

[00:39:09] It’s a lot of work today to figure out this archive, because his goal at the time, and the goal of all of these photographers was not to document Native life or document settler society. It was just to make a buck off of it, so they didn’t keep careful records. So like, who are these people? Like what year was this taken?

[00:39:27] Like why did he take this photo? Did someone pay him to take this photo or did he take this photo of his own accord and what did he do with it? I don’t know. There’s no way to know any of that. So in one way, like there’s really limited historical value to these photos. In some ways, all they do is kind of illustrate events that we have to find about elsewhere in the archives, in the story in El Palacio, his photos illustrate a really dramatic event in a very dramatic way, but I don’t know why he took them the way he took them.

[00:39:57] I don’t know, like what were these two union organizers thinking when they decided, oh, we’ll hold off going to the hospital. Let’s take some portrait photos of us bleeding in this guy’s camera shop first. Like why would they have done that? Like yeah, he was like one of the Chamber of Commerce guys and they were coming to fight these coal mine owners who were trying to have the people that they were working with.

[00:40:16] Not just beaten as a union but deported from this country. Why were they like, oh, Mullarky, let me go with this guy. I don’t know. What kind of role did he play in Gallup? Like did he have two feet in different worlds? Because the people that Mullarky replaced did not have two feet in different worlds like.

[00:40:32] Simeon Berger, the Catholic brother who was taking photos was like, held in low regard by Native People. He had to pay people to let him take pictures of them. In his book, that UNM Press, not his book, but the book of his photos that UNM Press published about, I think fifteen or so years ago, called Big Eyes.

[00:40:48] Big Eyes, by the way, was like the translation of the term Native people used. They called him “Big Eyes” ‘cause of his—okay, he never, he didn’t care about them unless it was a camera between him and the people. He took photos of the nightway ceremony, the Yéʼii Bi Chei Ceremony, the sacred Navajo winter dance that takes days and days to perform.

[00:41:07] You only do it one time of the year. It’s not for tourists. In fact, its performance at the intertribal ceremony in the sixties was the reason why young Navajo activists confronted the intertribal ceremonial because it was just completely a violation. And according to them that anyone would do the Yéʼii Bi Chei dance out of season and to tourists—he like, paid people to perform it and took photos.

[00:41:28] And it’s just depicted, as far as I can tell, it’s the first time it was ever depicted in a photo. And I think it was like 1909. And that’s like at a really important event, both historically important, but also important to Navajo people. And, and he just did it to make a buck, ’cause he wanted to make some postcards out of it.

[00:41:46] The camera shop owner was not a friend to Native people. The camera shop owner in a place like Gallup was like an Indian trader, you know? Like, they weren’t your friend. You would enter into a relationship with them, and it was usually a relationship with dad. You know, you were like pawning something or trading something, and you were rarely getting the better deal.

So I don’t know how to make sense of that when it comes to Mullarky. 

[00:42:06] Emily Withnall: I do want to mention though, because we did a reading for this article in El Palacio in Gallup, and what was fascinating to me and really exciting—and hopefully fruitful for you pursuing some of these questions: The current Sheriff of Gallup was there, and so he was very invested in the sheriff’s story.

[00:42:24] He was, and then there was a relative, right, of one of the men who had been jailed. 

[00:42:30] David: Yeah. They did eventually charge and convict. Well, they charged originally forty-eight people for the murder of the sheriff. They convicted three people. They went to jail. They were eventually released. And yeah. One of them was related to one of the men that was, that was jailed. And also the one of them was jailed. His brother was killed in the gunfight that led to the death of the sheriff. Because it’s the only on-duty death in McKinley County Sheriff Department history. Yeah, there was, that was an interesting day that, that, that and Gallup. 

[00:42:58] Emily Withnall: Yeah. So just to say like, the history is very alive.

[00:43:02] David Correia: My last book is about the 1902 Anthracite Strike in Pennsylvania, and I got an email from a minor who was relatives from someone. I mean, so there’s always, there’s always someone invested in this no matter where it is. And Gallup in particular, because this is such a contested history. 

[00:43:17] I mean, Intertribal Ceremonial, this, the Gallup Coal Strike. It’s well-known there. I mean, there were people there that gave tours related to this strike. Still today, there are murals in Gallup devoted to this strike and the fight by the miners afterwards. It’s definitely still alive. 

[00:43:33] Emily Withnall: Yeah. 

[00:43:33] David Correia: It’s not the past in New Mexico.

[00:43:36] It’s always present in one way or another, and that’s what’s really so interesting in working with photos, because the photos—that’s usually the one thing so difficult to find, to bring somebody who doesn’t have a personal connection to these histories unless you have the photos that can really bring to life an event.

[00:43:55] It’s hard for people to understand its significance or why that might be worth their time to pay attention to. And that’s why Mullarky is so valuable. Like he, for whatever purposes motivated him, why, for whatever reason he did what he did, he was able to capture the drama of like everyday moments in ways that I find rare.

[00:44:14] And really exciting. Which is not at all to minimize the primary role he played, which was to, you know, contribute to a version and view of Native people that that very much excluded them from everyday life and served to marginalize them economically, politically, culturally, and socially. So he was a very contradictory figure.

[00:44:36] And his photos somehow make him even more contradictory. Like they’re just really worth spending time on it. When you see the photos, you’re like, “What is going on? What is that?” And that’s just the lure to get people 

[00:44:47] Emily Withnall: Right, right. 

[00:44:48] David Correia: Like I guess we’re just like Mullarky. We’re using photos as a lure. I mean, his photos remain all lure. It’s pretty remarkable. 

[00:44:55] Emily Withnall: So, I know you said you have nothing but questions. Um, but I am curious because this is something I think about all the time. Every single issue of El Palacio that I edit, I think about what is missing the gaps in the archive, and the very interesting ways that different writers and historians approach that problem. So I’m curious about how you deal with that.

[00:45:19] David Correia: As I said at the beginning, most of my work is archival. Like when I tell stories, I go in the archive, and so there’s always gaps. And particularly when you work with archival material, you’re often introduced to a story from a particular perspective. Usually in the archives, it’s like the perspective of the people who had the means to leave a paper trail, and that’s never usually working people.

[00:45:38] Maybe it’s one of the reasons why I’m drawn to stories of like organized labor and the struggles of organized labor is because they’re one of the few times that regular. Regular working people leave a paper trail. 

[00:45:47] I tried to take that perspective in telling the story in El Palacio by using Mullarky photos as my guide.

[00:45:57] One of the things that he centers in his photos is regular people. There’s this great photo from Kitchen’s Opera House of the moment when the union members voted to go on strike. And there must be a hundred, two hundred people in the opera house all raising their hands for strike. And they’re almost entirely women and children.

[00:46:17] David Correia: And then there’s photos of the organizers and the photo is always Martha Roberts. So here’s a story about a strike run by a woman. And fought by women and children. Right. And so that’s the story, ’cause that’s not, by the way, that’s not how the story has been told by stories in the past. The historians tell stories about strikes; it’s always like strike leaders and politicians and their negotiations, right? No one’s told the story of the Gallup Coal Strike by focusing on Martha Roberts, and just the everyday folks who fought the strike. And those are the photos that Mullarky left us. And also, like, when he took pictures of the militia, it was of individual militia members, he caught their faces, like individual people who were just forced to come and point guns at their neighbors.

[00:47:00] And I spent a lot of time doing biographical work about Martha Roberts. 

[00:47:04]  Emily : Right. 

[00:47:04] David Correia: And who were these people that were being deported and like, what were their stories? That’s a really difficult thing to do when, in any other context I found, unless it’s some sort of official thing that forced them to tell their stories in official capacities.

[00:47:22] So they gave testimony in court hearings. They were hauled before judges. And had to give testimony and so I could find their words so I could tell the story from their perspective. That’s one of the ways that I try to fill the gaps by like knowing that their stories are somewhere just I have to go find it.

[00:47:39] You can’t just rely on the official archives, you’ve got to burrow your way underneath them, and there’s always an underneath. Mullarky gave us some hints, and so I just followed his hints. 

[00:47:50] Emily Withnall: Any last things you wanna say about Mullarky or anything else that we’ve covered? 

[00:47:56] David Correia: Uh, you know, the only thing I would say this is so worth spending time on.

[00:48:01] This photo collection would really, I think, fill a gap in New Mexico history. This is your gap question. I’ll come back to that. Which is like, this is a version of New Mexico that puts boosterism at the heart of so much of New Mexico’s official history, right on display. Like there’s great books like Chris Wilson’s The Myth of Santa Fe that do it, but there’s not a lot of histories that can do it so powerfully like Mullarky photos can do, and just put everything on display all at once and force us to grapple with what it means to live in a state built this way, by these people. 

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[00:48:36] Emily Withnall: If this episode has left you itching to see Mullarky photos, check them out in David’s article in the Fall 2025 issue of El Palacio. The link is in the show notes. We’ve also linked to the Palace of the Governors photo archives, which contains a wealth of images from 1845 to the present of New Mexico and the Greater Southwest. Thanks for listening.

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[00:49:14] Emily Withnall: Encounter Culture is a production of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. 

Our producer is Andrea Klunder at The Creative Impostor Studios. 

This season is produced and edited by Andrea Klunder and Alex Riegler with additional editing by Monica Braine. 

Our recording engineers are Collin Ungerleider and Kabby at Kabby Sound Studios in Santa Fe. 

[00:49:38] Technical direction and post-production audio by Edwin R. Ruiz. 

Our executive producer is Daniel Zillmann. 

Thank you to New Mexico artist “El Brujo” D’Santi Nava for our theme music. 

For a full transcript and show notes, visit podcast.nmculture.org or click the link in the episode description in your listening app. 

[00:50:01] I’m your host, Emily Withnall. 

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