There is something peculiar about Taos and the people who make art here. For more than a century, this small mountain community has attracted painters, sculptors, writers, photographers, and an assortment of creative minds who might have very little in common beyond their desire to create. Some arrive seeking inspiration, others seeking refuge from the world, while still others have been shaped by this country long before they understood themselves to be artists. Taos embraced the flamboyant genius of R.C. Gorman, the celebrated Navajo artist whose larger-than-life personality was nearly as famous as his work. But this same landscape has also nurtured quieter talents, people who pass through ordinary life without much fanfare, carrying extraordinary gifts that become apparent only when we encounter what they have created. Elijah Rael belongs to this latter company, an unassuming man from Llano Quemado whose photographs reveal an imagination alive to the immense beauty of the natural world and a Christian faith through which he understands his place within it.
Elijah arrived at The Espresso Bar inside Taos Valley Lodge without the hat I had come to recognize from his photographs. We had arranged to meet for HeyTaos, and there was little about his appearance to distinguish him from anyone else stopping in for coffee. Then he began showing me his work. Across the screen of his phone, lightning ripped through enormous thunderheads, mountains disappeared beneath the advancing darkness, and the New Mexico sky erupted into astonishing displays of color. I had admired his photography for years, but seeing those images in the company of the man who had captured them was a different experience. The photographs possessed a ferocity that seemed almost at odds with his reserved demeanor. Here was a man who appeared entirely comfortable remaining unnoticed, yet whose camera had witnessed some of the most magnificent spectacles this country could produce.
Perhaps that is part of what makes Taos such an enduring home for artists. The place itself has never demanded a particular personality or a single way of seeing. Its artistic history encompasses the celebrated and the obscure, the irreverent and the devout, those who transform themselves into public figures and those who would rather disappear into their work. Elijah's relationship with photography began when he was sixteen, growing from youthful curiosity into a serious artistic pursuit. Born and raised in New Mexico, he has developed a body of work grounded in the mountains, rivers, wildlife, and changing skies of the Southwest. His subjects are often the places we pass without a second thought, familiar stretches of country that have become so deeply woven into our lives that we sometimes forget to look at them. Elijah has never quite surrendered that capacity for astonishment, and the photographs he produces invite the rest of us to recover something of it.
Waiting for the Light
One of his remarkable photographs, The Storms Masterpiece, was taken from the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, where the vast open landscape allows the weather to unfold across an extraordinary distance. Beneath a formidable ceiling of storm clouds, a rainbow emerges while lightning illuminates the horizon and the setting sun washes the sky in gold, orange, and violet. The resulting image possesses an almost biblical grandeur, a scene so crowded with natural phenomena that it seems impossible they could have occurred together. But the photograph is also a testament to Elijah's mastery of his craft. Understanding the weather, anticipating changes in light, selecting a vantage point, and recognizing the instant when these elements come together require experience and judgment. The storm itself is beyond the photographer's control. What Elijah brings to the encounter is the ability to recognize the moment and preserve it before the sky changes again.
His artistic range extends well beyond violent weather. In 2022, his photograph Bighorn Gazing off into the Sunset, made near the Rio Grande Gorge Bridge, received an honorable mention in New Mexico Magazine's annual photography contest. The distinction is significant because the image reveals another side of his talent. A bighorn sheep standing in the evening light offers none of the spectacle of a thunderstorm, but photographing wildlife requires its own patience, preparation, and understanding of an animal's surroundings. Elijah's appreciation of the natural world is not limited to its most dramatic expressions. The quiet presence of a living creature, the contours of a familiar mountain, or the fading light over an ordinary field can offer a subject equally deserving of attention. His photographs reflect a photographer who finds beauty across the full range of the landscape, rather than one dependent upon spectacular events to make his work compelling.
Where Faith Meets the Frame
Yet understanding Elijah as an artist requires understanding the importance of God in his life. He makes no attempt to separate his Christian faith from his photography, publicly describing himself as a humble lensman capturing God's creation and giving glory and honor to God through Jesus Christ. He invokes Psalm 19:1, the biblical verse declaring that the heavens proclaim the glory of God, and throughout his photographic collection that conviction finds expression in the subjects he chooses. Among them is Faith in the Fire Wide Angle, photographed in Llano Quemado, the community we both call home. A weathered cross fashioned from latillas and barbed wire stands against a magnificent sunset, its rough silhouette surrounded by a sky burning with deep reds and gold. The cross is a humble construction, assembled from materials familiar to the rural landscape of Northern New Mexico, yet its presence transforms the photograph into something more intimate than a conventional landscape. There is no elaborate sanctuary, no marble altar, no stained glass separating the believer from the heavens. There is only an old wooden cross, the earth beneath it, and the vastness of the sky.
What makes this photograph particularly affecting is its simplicity. The cross could easily be overlooked by someone passing along the road, another weathered object in a landscape filled with remnants of fences, buildings, and generations of human labor. Elijah saw something worth preserving. For a man whose faith is rooted in the belief that the natural world reflects God's creation, such a scene carries an importance that cannot be measured entirely by its technical composition or aesthetic beauty. His Christianity does not excuse him from the discipline of photography, nor does it provide a substitute for artistic ability. Rather, it gives his work a deeply personal purpose. He has developed the skills of a photographer while approaching the world with the gratitude of a believer, and it is in the meeting of those two qualities that his individual artistic identity becomes clearest.
What the Landscape Remembers
There is another dimension of Elijah's work that speaks directly to those of us who call Taos home. For years, he photographed the Taos Welcome Tree, the familiar roadside landmark that greeted generations of travelers entering and leaving the valley. Its solitary silhouette became part of the emotional geography of this place, a quiet indication that the long road home was nearly over. On June 8, 2026, the tree fell, ending a presence that had outlasted countless journeys beneath the New Mexico sky. Elijah's photographs now preserve it through seasons of snow, shifting clouds, and the extraordinary colors of evening. In those images, the tree remains exactly where generations remembered it, still standing beside the road. Its loss reveals something essential about the importance of artists who document their own communities. What begins as an appreciation of beauty can become, with the passing of time, a record of people and places that might otherwise disappear from view.
Taos has long celebrated the artists who came here and transformed the region into an internationally recognized center of artistic life. Their paintings hang in museums, their names adorn galleries, and their contributions have become inseparable from the town's cultural identity. But the artistic life of Taos has never belonged exclusively to those whose names have entered the history books. It continues in the people living among us, in studios tucked behind adobe walls, in workshops, in homes filled with unfinished work, and in the hands of photographers who venture into the countryside to record what others might never see. Elijah belongs to that living tradition. His photographs are not an outsider's romantic interpretation of Northern New Mexico, but the work of someone who knows these places through the experience of living among them, who can recognize their ordinary character as readily as their extraordinary beauty.
I left our meeting with a different appreciation for the man whose photographs I had followed for so long. Elijah's talent had been apparent to me well before we sat down together, but his faith gave me a greater understanding of the person behind the camera. His modest presence, his devotion to God, and the astonishing images he carried with him seemed to belong naturally to the same life. Taos has produced and welcomed artists of every temperament, from those whose personalities could fill a room to those whose gifts are revealed only when we take the time to discover them. Elijah Rael may never possess the boisterous public presence of an R.C. Gorman, nor does he need to. His contribution is quieter, rooted in the familiar country surrounding his home and in a belief that its beauty is a gift worth honoring. I had come to meet a remarkable photographer. I left believing I had met something more: a man whose faith had taught him to recognize God's beauty in the world, and whose talent allowed the rest of us to see it too.