Born in Colorado, Laura Gilpin attended a Connecticut preparatory school to study music and later the Clarence H. White School of Photography in New York. Study with White led her to initially embrace a pictorialist style that emphasized beauty and artistic creation over photography’s documentary qualities.As photography advanced in the early decades of the 20th century, Gilpin turned away from the Pictorialist-inspired images and began taking “straight photographs.” In a field traditionally championed by men, Gilpin was one of the first women to capture the landscape of the West becoming widely known for her extended documentation of the Southwestern landscape and the Diné (Navajo) people.