Time Exposures of Destruction

Lorran Meares tells stories about what happens to Indian rock art and historic sites when nobody’s watching: stories of thieves using power tools to chisel petroglyphs from the rock, of vandals spray-painting over 10,000-year-old pictographs, of developers and mining companies obliterating ancient sacred sites.

For the last 10 years, Meares and his wife, Charlotte, have crossed North America, photographing the vandalism, destruction and looting of art and artifacts at hundreds of sites of American Indian culture.

The Elkhorn, Neb., couple travel to the Southwest every summer, often at the invitation of Indian groups or individuals.

They visit sites and document their demise. They also photograph the sites as fine art in one-of-a-kind, often colorfully lighted scenes, which they “light paint” by means of homemade spotlights at night.

“It’s his personal commitment--he just enjoys doing it. He doesn’t expect any profit on it,” said Zuni muralist Alex Seotewa, who worked with Meares to produce a poster of Our Lady of Guadalupe Catholic Church on the Zuni Reservation.

The poster has helped the tribe raise money to maintain the historic structure and its interior murals.

Joe Pachak, a Blanding, Utah, sculptor who documents rock art for preservation archeologists in Utah, said Meares’ “exquisite” photos have “taught a lot of people the appreciation of both rock art and Anasazi ruins” in the Southwest.

“I think there’s an intrinsic value to his photography--it is a record of the way it was, the way the ruins and rock art happened to be. They’re very, very crisp, clean images,” Pachak said.

For Meares, photographing sacred Indian sites is personal. It’s a means of expressing the loss he feels at the disappearance of the natural surroundings of his youth.

Meares, 49, grew up in Tampa, Fla., after World War II, where developers drained swamps and phosphate mines killed rivers. When he began photographing sacred sites, the remembrance of that loss “was paramount on my mind.”

Meares began taking pictures in high school and became serious about photography as an undergraduate at Mercer University, a small private college in Macon, Ga., where he studied zoology.

One day in Macon, Meares stumbled upon Rose Hill, a Civil War-era cemetery, a place that he recalls gave him his first taste of “resonance that came from the land.”

He began to use the cemetery as a backdrop for black-and-white photographs. Soon he changed his major to art, returned to Tampa and took a job with the University of South Florida as a photographer.

He began working in color as well, perfecting the art of stereoscopic photography with homemade cameras, the parts salvaged from military surplus bins. Those photographs, usually viewed in matching pairs through an old-fashioned stereoscope, render the scenes in three dimensions--a format Meares likens to peering through a keyhole into another world.

He earned his bachelor’s degree from the University of Central Florida in Orlando and his master’s of fine arts at the University of Denver, where he taught as artist-in-residence.

A show featuring Meares’ stereo prints caught the attention of the National Park Service, which in 1989 commissioned him to create posters for Chaco Culture National Historic Park’s United Nations designation as a World Heritage Site.

“That was the start of the whole thing,” Meares said.

Meares began traveling frequently to the Southwest on photography expeditions, both with classes and on his own. Soon the Sierra Club offered him a spot on its Native American Sites Committee, formed to preserve Indian cultural sites.

Work for the committee took Meares each summer to sites plundered by relic hunters and grave robbers. Meares photographed many of the sites for the committee, the U.S. Forest Service and the federal Bureau of Land Management.

The photographs, around which Meares built slide shows on the subject of preservation, soon became his way of making people aware of the need to preserve the sites. The slide shows, as well as trips Meares continues to lead to the sites, also have encouraged students to begin photographing sites for preservation.

In 1993, the Sierra Club produced a photo calendar of Meares’ sacred sites fine art work, which won the Curator’s Choice award as best single-photographer calendar of the year from the Roger Tory Peterson Institute of Natural History in Jamestown, N.Y.

Jim Cohee, a senior editor at Sierra Club Books in San Francisco, which produced the calendar, said it was one of the more popular--and unusual--calendars the organization has published.

“He’s a visionary guy. I was terribly impressed with what he did,” Cohee said. “I think he wanted to prove to people that he was standing in spiritual places, and I think he did that very, very well.”

Profits from the calendars or Meares’ own prints go to preservation efforts.

Meares said the biggest peril to sacred sites these days comes from “the sheer magnitude of population growth,” such as a road project proposed for Petroglyph National Monument on Albuquerque’s west side and the pressures placed on sites by mining.