Big Blend Radio: Photographer Stan Honda at Fort Union National Monument

Join Nancy J. Reid and Lisa D. Smith, the mother-daughter travel team and publishers of Big Blend Magazines, for Big Blend Radio’s 1st Friday Toast to The Arts & Parks Show. This episode features acclaimed astrophotographer and photojournalist Stan Honda who discusses his one-month National Parks Arts Foundation artist residency at Fort Union National Monument in Northern New Mexico. Park Superintendent Lorenzo Vigil joins in the discussion to share the history of the Fort as well as the visitor experience.

With its recent designation as an International Dark Sky Park, Fort Union is an ideal location for Stan Honda who uses digital photography to produce images of night sky landscapes, showing the relationship between the celestial and the terrestrial, putting the vastness of the visible universe into human perspective. Exposed to the wind, within a sweeping valley of short grass prairie, amid the swales of the Santa Fe Trail, lie the territorial-style adobe remnants of the largest 19th century military fort in the region. For forty years, 1851-1891, Fort Union functioned as an agent of political and cultural change, whether desired or not, in New Mexico and throughout the Southwest. It also was the hub of commerce, national defense, and migration at the final stretch of the Santa Fe Trail.

Featured music is “Into Starlight” from the album “Aerial Views” by Imrat guitarist Todd Mosby.