In 1982 and 1983, while living at NA Bolom in San Cristobal de Las Casas, Mexico, and working on Gertrude Blom: Bearing Witness, Margaret Sartor and I came to know Gertrude Blom (Trudi) well. Her husband, the archeologist Franz Blom, had died a decade earlier. In writing a history of Trudi’s life for that book, I learned a lot about the extraordinary relationship and partnership between Trudi and Franz. In 2017 in my North Carolina Studio, I came across tiny contact prints we had made in the 80s of every picture we could find of Trudi and Franz together, or separately on expedition in the jungles of Mexico. I was especially interested to see the many sides of Trudi that come through in her portraits – from the jungle explorer to the fashionable lady – as well as images showing Trudi with the Lacondon Maya, evidence of her close personal relationships to many individuals in this tribe. I thought to reproduce all the portraits here as a repository of images of Gertrude and Franz Blom.
