Gertrude Blom - Mexico 1940-1969

Mexico 1940-1969

In Mexico City, Blom was hired as a government social worker to study and report on the working conditions of Mexican women. Later, while researching women who had fought as zapatistas with Emiliano Zapata's revolutionary army, Blom bought her first camera to help document her work. In 1943, influenced by the adventures of French antropologist Jacques Soustelle, whose book on jungle exploration she had read on the boat to Mexico, Blom convinced a government minister to let her join a Chiapas expedition going in search of the legendary and rarely photographed Lacandon Maya. Blom later credited her attractive appearance and the camera she wore around her neck for her place on this first official Lacandon expedition, which was to be conducted on horseback. Blom had never ridden a horse before.

Not only did Blom become an expert horsewoman, photograph the Lacandon, and write a book about the 1943 expedition, she found in the Lacandon Mayan people and their jungle home her life's avocation. Later that year, on a second expedition to visit another Lacandon settlement, she met Frans Blom, a Danish archeologist and cartographer who was in the jungle searching for the Mayan ruin of Bonampak. They teamed up on several subsequent jungle explorations, which later provided the material for a two-volume study La Selva Lacandona.

By 1951, Frans and Gertrude Blom had married. To be closer to the jungle, they moved from Mexico City to San Cristóbal de las Casas, Chiapas. There, they bought a derelict monastery which they restored and named Casa Na Bolom, or House of the Jaguar. To support the household and Frans' Mayan studies, the Bloms took in paying guests for meals. Eventually, Casa Na Bolom evolved into an inn attracting visitors from all over the world, including archeologists from major American universities and guests as notable as Diego Rivera, François Mitterrand, Helen Hayes, and Henry Kissinger.

For the next 12 years, until Frans Blom's death in 1963, the Bloms shared a passion for expeditions in search of Mayan ruins. On these trips and sometimes as a paid jungle guide for others, Gertrude Blom continued photographing the Mayan people. She had little interest in the technical side of photography. Blom considered her camera a tool for documenting the people and culture of a rapidly changing place. Once a picture was taken, Blom often lost interest or forgot to develop prints.