Life Up Till Now
I was born in New York City when the city was home to three baseball teams, the Yankees, Giants and Dodgers. On Sundays in the summer, my dad, uncle and I would walk from my grandmother’s home in the Bronx to the Stadium or the Polo Grounds to see whichever team, Yanks or the Giants, was playing that day. I only went to Ebbets Field once, in faraway Brooklyn.
They were old, my father’s family, Hungarian Jews. My dad was born in New York, in 1896, the eldest of five children. He went to high school at night in order to work during the day to help support his family. My mother also grew up in New York, but spent a good deal of her childhood in Mexico City, the home of her parents. Dad was 49 when I was born; my mother was 19.
My father and mother, New York, late 1940s-early 1950s
Ten years of my childhood, ages 8-18, were spent in boarding school, Peekskill Military Academy. Looking back, with a focus softened by fifty years, PMA no longer seems that bad. At the time, however, being there felt like I was living an interminable prison sentence. Family life it was not.
After graduating from PMA, I went to college at American University, in Washington, D.C. I was unprepared for so much freedom—not to mention the sixties—and I pretty much squandered the opportunity for serious learning during those undergraduate years. After American, I trained for Peace Corps in Columbia, but did not serve. Instead I entered a Master’s program in Photography at Ohio University, completing an M.A., in 1970. During my tenure at OU, I was accepted to study with Minor White, in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
My first famous person photo: Janis Joplin, London, 1969
In the fall of 1971, I joined the Center for Photographic Studies, Louisville, as Associate Director. During my tenure at the Center, I started a program in which we published portfolios of original photographs by well known artists who were working in the Midwest. They included Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Henry Holmes Smith and Ken Josephson. I also developed and directed the Images & Ideas Lecture Series at Louisville’s Speed Museum; the series continued for many years.
Brochures designed by Julius Friedman for the Center for Photographic Studies.
In 1974, I moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico to concentrate on my own creative work. And in 1976, I was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship. In the 1970s and 1980s, I was represented in Cronin Gallery, Houston, Robert Freidus Gallery, New York, and Andrew Smith Gallery, Santa Fe. In 1976, I began adding handwritten narrative texts to my photographs. Shortly after I completed my first series, which was called “Letters to My Father,” I read that Duane Michals also was writing with photographs and had done a piece called “Letter From My Father.”
The 1970s and 1980s were a time of intense creative work, with new bodies of work coming nonstop. I also taught (always adjunct) at Santa Fe Preparatory School, Santa Fe Community College, and the University of New Mexico.
In 1991, in order to “learn a little something” about digital photography, I entered a Master of Design program at Chicago’s Institute of Design, completing the degree, in 1993. My thesis project, “A Family Album,” consisted of portraits, interviews and rephotographed snapshots of various families in the Graceland West neighborhood of Chicago. In 1994, I was awarded an Illinois Arts Council Grant. And in 1994-1995, I taught at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. My wife, dog, cat, and I returned home to New Mexico, in 1995.
Back in New Mexico, I did consulting work for the Museum of New Mexico and New Mexico Arts, the state’s arts agency. In 1997, I founded New Mexico CultureNet, an educational and informational nonprofit organization. While CultureNet has done a broad range of programs, its focus for the past decade has been its Poets-in-the-Schools program, which has reached thousands of middle and high school students over the years. The Great Recession of 2008 precipitated a change in the fortunes of CultureNet and afforded me the opportunity to concentrate on photography once more.
In 2012, I took classes at Santa Fe Community College, where I had started the Photography program twenty years before. These classes provided the stimulus for me to again produce viable work. Within a year, I felt that not only had my photography self been resurrected, but the work I was producing was as good as anything I had done previously.
June 2024, as Artist-in-Residence, New Mexico Museum of Art Vladem Contemporary, I will produce a project in which New Mexico Families are invited into the museum to have their portraits taken; these family portraits will result in an in-person and an online exhibition.
Work in Public Collections
Addison Gallery of American Art • Albuquerque Museum • American Express Corp. • Australian National Gallery • Blue Cross-Blue Shield, Albuquerque • Brooklyn Museum of Art • Center for Creative Photography • Cincinnati Art Museum • Commodities Corporation, Princeton • Eskenazi Museum of Art, Indiana University • FHP Corporation • George Eastman Museum • Gernsheim Collection, UT Austin • Institute of Design, Illinois Institute of Technology • Light Works, Syracuse University • Los Angeles • Harwood Museum, Taos • County Museum • Haystack Mountain School of Crafts • High Museum of Art • Hilliard Museum • Institute of Design / IIT • International Center for Photography • Light Works, Syracuse University • Los Angeles County Museum of Art • Madison Art Center • Minneapolis Institute of Arts • Musée des beaux-arts du Canada • Museum of Contemporary Photography • Museum of Fine Arts, Houston • National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, NY • National Gallery of Canada • New Mexico Museum of Art • New Mexico Photographic Archives • New Mexico State University • New Orleans Historic Collection • New Orleans Museum of Art • Ohio Wesleyan University • Ottawa Art Gallery • Pasadena Art Museum • Rochester Institute of Technology, Wallace Library • Rough Rider Collection, Las Vegas, NM Museum • Sam Houston State University • San Francisco Museum of Modern Art • Speed Art Museum • University of Louisville Photographic Archives • University of New Mexico Art Museum • University of Oklahoma Memorial Art Center • Visual Studies Workshop • Wesleyan University, CT •
Larry’ Leithardt’s Mother and Father, Digital Iris print
Collection New Mexico Museum of Art
Print Sales
Link to how to purchase photographs from this website.
Major Publications
Shine On You Crazy Diamond: Poems by Teens & Their Mentors, Editor, Sunstone Press, 2004.
Las Vegas, New Mexico: A Portrait; photographs by Alex Traube, text by E.A. Mares, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1983.
The American Voice, No. 1, Winter, 1985-1986, pp. 43-49, Fall, 1988.
Artists of 20th Century New Mexico, Museum of New Mexico Press, 1992, p. 128,
The Animal in Photography, 1843-1985, Alexandra Noble, ed., The Photographers’ Gallery, London, England, 1986, p. 73.
Creative Camera; No. 237, September 1984, pp. 1516-1517
El Palacio, Vol. 92, No. 3, Spring, 1987, Santa Fe, NM, p. 9; Fall, 1988
Family of Woman; Julia Scully, ed., Grosset & Dunlap, NY, 1979, p. 81
Harvard Magazine; Vol. 85:6, July-August, 1983, p. 81
Local Light; Guy Mendes & Jonathan Greene, eds., KY Arts Comm, 1976, p. 37.
Grants & Fellowships
Illinois Arts Council Grant, 1994
Graham Foundation Fellowship, Institute of Design, Chicago, 1993
Institute of Design Leadership Fellowship, 1991-1992
Art in Public Places, City of Phoenix, 1988
Light Work/Syracuse University, Artist in Residence, 1979
National Endowment for the Arts, Fellowship in still photography, 1977
Education
The Mediation Alliance, Albuquerque, Mediation Certification, 1996
Institute of Design / Illinois Institute of Technology, Master of Design, 1993
Ohio University, M.A., Photography, 1970
Graduate study with Minor White, Cambridge, MA, 1970
Graduate study, Center of The Eye, Aspen, 1969-70
American University, B.A., Government, 1968
Return to New Mexico Family Photos / Regresar a Nuevo Mexico Fotos de Familias
Alex Traube Photography 