Photographing in the Land of Enchantment

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Yet, after eighteen successful years in New York City, Kennedy knew that his life needed to change. In 1987, he, his wife Lucy and son Jesse, moved into a century old adobe house in the remote community of Cerrillos, New Mexico, and took up a lifestyle described by one reporter as "neo-unpretentious." Here, Kennedy was determined to satisfy his deepest desire to make personal photography of western lands and skies. If he had any doubts of the outcome, he didn't show it, despite the fact their income dropped some $200,000 that year. In an effort to give something back to his adopted community, Kennedy joined The Turquoise Trail Volunteer Fire Department, eventually becoming its Deputy Chief. Fires, wounded animals, car wrecks and even derailed trains in New Mexico's back country made his experiences in New York seem tame by comparison. He spent the rest of his time photographing.

Kennedy's hard work, combined with Lucy's framing skills, quickly resulted in gallery representation in and around Santa Fe. His palladium prints of southwest lands and New York celebrities immediately brought sales and recognition. People from all over the world seemed to agree that, compared to a thousand other images in Santa Fe galleries, Kennedy had captured what they had seen and felt in the southwest, and they were quick to purchase one or more of his images. The Santa Fe Photographic Workshop invited him to teach portrait and landscape classes, as well as a special one-on-one course in the palladium/platinum process in which a student lived and worked in Kennedy's home.

In the new and remarkably beautiful surroundings, Kennedy relished the solitude of New Mexico. He photographed constantly and quickly built up a large inventory. An isolated tree under brewing thunder heads, the empty dirt roads of Taos pueblo, an abandoned car baking in the heat, boulders sculpted by wind and rain, a nest of barn owls, the weathered innocence of a neighbor's face -- these and many other images captured the southwest's compelling intensity and wildness. Unlike the cool black and white values of silver print photographs, the rich brown tones of his palladium images, bordered by lively brush strokes, recalled turn-of-the-century sepia photogravures of Edward S. Curtis and albumen prints by William Henry Jackson. The similarity was more than visual since Kennedy laboriously made each palladium print by hand, using technical skills he had learned years ago at Brooks Institute in Santa Barbara, California.