Corrales through the lens: Photography book collects images from 'Eighteen Years in the Village'

Photographer Dennis Chamberlain has organized a book that has a minimum amount of words and a maximum amount of images.

The book is titled “Eighteen Years in the Village: A Photographic Tour of Corrales, New Mexico.” Chamberlain has been living in the village for that long.

And through the lenses of his digital Nikon cameras, Chamberlain finds beauty in a multitude of subjects — people, animals, buildings, balloons, waterways, trees and mountains.

Corrales through the lens: Photography book collects images from 'Eighteen Years in the Village'

Some of the photos are of the natural landscape of Corrales, such as “An Early Spring Snow” on West Valverde Road, “The Corrales Bosque in the Fall,” and the tall, overhanging tree limbs of “Mariquita Road” with a Porsche in the far background.

Some of the beauties are Chamberlain’s portraits of people. Among them are Corrales artists B.C. Nowlin, Chris Turri, Juan Wijngaard, Barbara Clark and Sherry Gross, and jazz trumpeter Bobby Shew.

Chamberlain finds beauty in human-made structures, such as the high-ceilinged Sala Grande of Casa San Ysidro: The Gutiérrez-Minge House, the long pergola at the Casa Perea Art Space and the Old San Ysidro Church in a snowstorm.

He encounters beauty in the animal kingdom — a coyote in the Corrales bosque, and several images of sandhill cranes, which are seasonal residents of the village during their migratory months.

There’s a handful of photographs of horses with humans on or alongside them. One shows Harry Touloumis, a horse shoer, standing next to a horse. Chamberlain writes that Touloumis, nicknamed “Wild Horse Harry,” is a village icon.

On another page, Andrew Roybal is on horseback in the 2023 Corrales July Fourth Parade.

In the early part of the book are a batch of photographs of hot air balloons — aloft, landing in Corrales — during the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta.

In fact, the front cover has a cropped version of a photograph from inside the book called “Balloon Fiesta Morning” that Chamberlain had taken from above Sagebrush Drive in Corrales in 2008.

Perhaps the most imposing and breathtaking images are reserved for the Sandias, sans balloons, that he shot from Corrales.

One of those is a dramatic photograph of the muscular, deep orange-red Sandias over pages 2 and 3. It is appropriately titled “The Watermelon Mountain.” Sandia is Spanish for watermelon.

Two other captivating mountain photos are “The Sandia Towers in the Clouds” on a morning in January 2021 and “First Snow,” which displays the Sandias after a chilling snowfall that blanketed the mountain in mid-December 2010.

Chamberlain said in a phone interview that after about five years of taking pictures of people in Corrales, he expanded his interest to other subjects.

He is president of the Corrales Arts Center, and for 10 years was the New Mexico Councilor of the Professional Photographers of America.

Chamberlain moved to Corrales from Dallas, where he had worked as a certified public accountant for about four decades.

“I had considered myself a fairly decent amateur photographer. I became serious about photography in 2000 in large part because of the digital age,” he said.

Chamberlain was raised in Rochester, New York. He said his first camera was a medium-format hand-me-down from his father, Philip M. Chamberlain.

His father was the manager of the Eastman Kodak Processing Lab in Dallas at the time that developed the famous Abraham Zapruder film of President John F. Kennedy’s assassination.