Miguel Gandert's most common subject is the daily life of rural Hispanos living in the Rio Grande Valley, which stretches from Mexico to southern Colorado. He has also focused on the urban lives of Hispano families in cities such as Albuquerque and smaller towns in northern New Mexico. Photographing for four decades, he has produced a multifaceted portrait of life along the U.S.-Mexico border and in the crossings of Spanish colonial and Indigenous Mesoamerican traditions. His insider status as a native New Mexican of mixed Indo-Hispano heritage helps him approach a variety of contexts, people, and situations.

In the early 1980s, the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe commissioned twelve New Mexico photographers to document their state for a book funded in part by the National Endowment for the Arts. Earlier surveys undertaken by major nineteenth- and twentieth-century photographers for the United States Geological Survey and the Farm Security Administration, respectively, were points of reference. Focused on the people of urban New Mexico, Gandert's contributions show quiet domestic moments in the historically working-class neighborhoods of Albuquerque, demonstrations of youthful prowess, and bodies and faces marked by the strains of daily life. In one image, the brutalist architecture of the Civic Plaza in downtown Albuquerque, built in 1974, is a backdrop for a water fountain that in the 1980s served as a makeshift pool for local residents. Designed in the shape of the Zia Indian sun symbol that appears on the New Mexico state flag, the fountain was, ironically, a source of relief from the intense heat of the sun for Albuquerque youth. The variety of subjects seen in the artist's works emphasizes his commitment to acknowledging and recording the diversity of the populations of New Mexico.

- Rocío Aranda-Alvarado