Gertrude Duby Blom and E. Winifred Pitkin Photograph Collection

Collection

Identifier: PAAC-103

Staff Only

Scope and Contents

This collection is made up of photographs taken by Gertrude Duby Blom that were collected by Winifred Pitkin. There are 94 loose photographs and 3 photograph albums. The subjects of Blom's photography were the Lacandon Maya, their day to day life, portraits, as well as Mayan ruins. After Winifred Pitkin came to Mexico to visit the Bloms, she wrote a book and gave lectures about her visit. It is very likely that Pitkin used these photographs and albums alongside her lectures. The written lectures as well as lecture notes and note cards can be found in the Fray Angelico Chavez History Library, AC105 box 17 folder 2, box 16 folder 6, and box 19 folder 8.

Dates

1959

Creator

Blom, Gertrude Duby (Person)

Biographical / Historical

Dr. E. Winifred Pitkin (1877 – 1960) Edith Winifred Pitkin was born in Albany, New York, March 7, 1899 to parents Wolcott Homer Pitkin and Mary Wool Southwick Pitkin. She graduated from Wellesley College with a Bachelor of Science in 1902, followed by a Doctor of Medicine at Tufts Medical School in 1906. Following the completion of her medical degree, she became a horse and buggy doctor around Congers, New York, where her family had a farm. She eventually converted the barn into a clinic. She worked in family medicine, as well as pediatrics and “well baby” clinics around Rockland County, New York, including a 30 year stint heading the Well Baby Clinic of Rockland County. Later in life, she took an interest in Latin American history and archaeology. At 70 years old she traveled largely by burro through Mexico to friends Gertrude and Frans Blom’s home, Casa Na Bolom, in San Cristobal de las Casa, Chiapas. About this trip Pitkin wrote a book, Hidden Cities of Middle America: The Archaeological Adventures of a Septuagenarian in 1959, and traveled giving lectures about her visit. It is very likely she brought these photographs along to show at her lectures.

Gertrude “Trudi” Duby Blom (1901 - 1993) Gertrude Duby Blom was born in Bern, Switzerland July 7, 1901. In 1918 she completed a degree in horticulture and headed to Zurich to study social work. It was there that she joined the Socialist party and took an interest in journalism and politics. Shortly after, she left school to travel and speak on behalf of the Socialist party. She married Kurt Duby in 1925, but ended the marriage after only a few years in order to travel to Germany to report on the rise of Adolf Hitler. Reporting on Nazi Germany eventually led her to Paris, where she worked as an anti-fascist organizer and journalist. Following an arrest in 1939, she was to be deported back to Switzerland and planned to travel to New York to continue work for war refugees. Instead, she joined a group of pacifists, communists, labor leaders, artists and Jews welcomed as immigrants to Mexico by President Lázaro Cárdenas. While researching women who fought as zapatistas with Emiliano Zapata in the Mexican Revolution, she bought her first camera. Shortly after, she joined an expedition to Chiapas to document the Lacandon Maya. On her second visit to the region, she met Frans Blom, a Danish archaeologist and cartographer. The two were married in 1951 and purchased a building constructed in 1891 that had been meant to be a seminary. They restored the building and grounds and named it Casa Na Bolom, house of the jaguar. Casa Na Bolom served not only as their home, but also as an inn, where they hosted many renowned archaeologists, and as a center of support for Lacandon Maya. Gertrude and Frans continued exploring and documenting Mayan ruins until his death in 1963, after which Gertrude continued documenting the lives of the Lacandon Maya on her own. In the 1970s, as the area around her home and the Lacandon people was being heavily logged and deforested, she became an environmental activist, even using Casa Na Bolom as a tree nursery to replant logged areas. Blom died in 1993 at the age of 92, and is buried alongside Frans in La Selva Lacandona, the Lacandon Jungle.