Label Type
Cultural/Historical ContextLabel
Postcards from Mecca
The California Desert Photographs of Susie Keef Smith and Lula Mae Graves
1916-1936
Susie Keef Smith (1900-1988) took a job as a postmaster at the lowest-elevation post office in the United States in 1926. Mecca, on the north edge of the Salton Sea, was the jumping-off place for the mysterious desert east to the Colorado River, home to wandering prospectors, nomads, cowboys and surveyors. Soon Susie and her cousin, Lula Mae Graves (1908-2008), were exploring the Big Unknown by foot, burro, and Model T Ford.
They forged into roadless canyons and sand-bogged bajadas with a six gun and cameras by their sides. While making postcards for the post office spinner rack, the cousins photographed the last vestiges of the desert frontier and left us the most comprehensive known portrait of this slice of desert.
Postcard photographers such as Burton Frasher and Stephen Willard are known today for their California desert photos but Susie and Lula have been overlooked til now. After Susie's death in 1988, her life's work was almost lost to history when a public administrator threw out all her belongings. A savvy archaeologist jumped into a dumpster and retrieved many of the photographs you see in this exhibit, now in the holdings of the Mojave Desert Heritage and Cultural Association. A large collection of Lula Mae Graves photographs has been preserved, as well, by her grandson, Warner V. Graves III.