Tucker, Toba Pato. Pueblo Artists: Photographic portraits by Toba Pato Tucker.

University of New Mexico Press, 1998. Photographs by Toba Pato Tucker with texts by Alfred L. Bush, Rina Swentzell, and Lonnie Vigil. Stiff wraps, folio, more than 12"x15”, near fine with small crimp on rear cover. 166 pages. Unstated first edition, later reprinted.  Custom made 4-mil mylar protector. Gift quality. Black and white portraits by Tucker of Native American artists of the Southwest, including pueblos of Taos, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo, Acoma, and others.  

Summary: Over the course of about two and a half years (mid-1990s), Tucker traveled throughout the Southwest — visiting pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona — to document contemporary artists who belong to Pueblo communities.  The book contains expressive black-and-white portraits of Pueblo artists — potters, jewelers, weavers, painters, sculptors — sometimes shown with their artwork, sometimes with family, pets, or surroundings, offering a glimpse into both their creativity and everyday lives. Through these portraits, Tucker seeks to honor the individuals as unique persons — not just representatives of a heritage or tradition — and to capture how artistic traditions are passed from generation to generation within Pueblo families.  The book underscores the idea that for Pueblo peoples, artistry isn’t just an occupation — it’s part of a continuum that connects people across time, rooted in ancestral traditions and community identity. It serves both as an artistic and historical record at the turn of the 20th to 21st century — highlighting living artists, their lives, and their deep cultural ties, rather than reducing them to ethnographic objects.  In short: Pueblo Artists: Portraits is a respectful, intimate photographic album that gives faces — and dignity — to individual Pueblo artists. Through Tucker’s lens, readers see the vibrant continuity of Pueblo art traditions, embodied in real people, homes, and communities.

Toba Pato Tucker (born July 1, 1935) is an American documentary portrait photographer and educator celebrated for her empathetic black-and-white studies of diverse American communities. Born in the Bronx, New York, she worked in the education department of the Whitney Museum of American Art before pursuing photography in the 1970s and later joining the faculty at the International Center of Photography in 1978. Working primarily with medium-format cameras, silver gelatine prints, and an intimate, direct approach, Tucker spent decades capturing respectful portraits alongside recorded oral histories to document continuity and change across American life. Her major projects and published photobooks include Heber Springs Portraits: Continuity and Change in the World Disfarmer Photographed (1996), Pueblo Artists: Portraits (1998), and Haudenosaunee: Portraits of the Firekeepers, the Onondaga Nation (1999), as well as dedicated visual surveys of the Shinnecock, Montauk, and Navajo people. Her extensive archive is housed at Yale University's Beinecke Library, and her work is held in permanent museum collections nationwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the Brooklyn Museum.