Obscura Gallery is proud to host a special exhibition and book signing celebrating Lynn Adler: And So We Moved To Petaca — Portrait of a New Mexico Community featuring photography by Lynn Adler and curated by Bill Shapiro. Both the show and the newly released companion volume (University of New Mexico Press, 2026) offer a deeply moving photographic record of several countercultural families who chose to embrace traditional Nuevomexicano ways of life in the remote village of Petaca, New Mexico, during the early 1970s.

Few women photographers were working in the early 1970s, and even fewer were gaining recognition for ethnographic documentary work. Lynn Adler was entirely self-taught, working with an old camera inherited from her mother. Yet her natural ability to read the tension between colliding cultures, combined with an almost instinctive gift for composition, enabled her to document an extraordinary and singular moment in the small northern New Mexico village of Petaca. At that time, the village was home to roughly fifty deeply rooted Hispano families whose ties to the land stretched back more than a century. There was no school, no medical facility, no traffic lights — only a single church, a bar, a dry-goods store, and one gas pump. Spanish was the dominant language, and since the closure of a local mineral mill in the 1950s there had been virtually no formal employment, with most residents surviving through subsistence farming. Into this community arrived a wave of newcomers who had left behind city life in San Francisco and New York, drawn by the desire for something more grounded and real. It was during visits to friends who had already settled there that Adler made these photographs between 1970 and 1974.

Her intimate black-and-white images show her Anglo companions immersed in the demanding realities of homesteading and raising children; they portray the local community tending crops and caring for their animals; and they capture the moments when the two groups found common ground. Five decades have passed since Adler last pointed her lens at Petaca. The children who once darted through her frames are now well into middle age, and the elders have long since passed. Without these photographs, this brief and vivid chapter in community life would have vanished entirely — a story of connection and friction that would otherwise never have been told.