Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) was an American photographer best known for her southwestern landscapes and for her photographic studies of the Pueblo and Navajo Indians.

Laura Gilpin was born in Austin Bluffs, Colorado, on April 22, 1891. Although she briefly attended eastern boarding schools, she grew up in Colorado Springs and always thought of herself as a westerner. Even as a child she enjoyed exploring the mountains around her home. In 1903 Gilpin got a Brownie camera, which she used the following year to photograph the St. Louis World's Fair, and about 1909 she began experimenting with autochromes, a new color photographic process developed in France. Living on her family's ranch on the western slope of the Rockies from 1911 to 1915, Gilpin raised poultry and continued making pictures. By the time she went to New York in 1916 to study at the Clarence H. White School of Photography (with money saved from her poultry business...