Nancy Newhall, 1942, by Barbara Morgan, CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
Nancy Newhall (1908 – 1974)
Nancy Wynne Newhall was an American photography writer and curator best known as the champion of the landscape photographers Ansel Adams and Paul Strand, and as the co-founder of Aperture Magazine – one of the first magazines to promote photography – alongside photographers Minor White, Dorothea Lange and Barbara Morgan. She worked collaboratively with her husband, the museum photographic curator and historian Beaumont Newhall (1908-1993), throughout her career.
Nancy wrote presciently in the first issue of Aperture in 1952, ‘…the old literacy of words is dying and a new literacy of images is being born… Perhaps the printed page will disappear and even our records will be kept in images and sounds.’ She helped define photography as an art form and shape the concept of the modern photographic book, with her use of text and innovative design, in the large, ‘oversized’ format.
Originally a painter, Nancy took up photography in 1937 and started writing about the art in New York City. She first began working with the Californian photographers Ansel Adams and Edward Weston after a visit in 1940, and their friendship grew when Adams came to New York to help advise the new photography department at MoMA, with Beaumont Newhall. At that time Nancy was interviewing legendary photographer Alfred Stieglitz for a planned biography and was greatly influenced by his vision of photography as a spiritual and artistic medium.
She assumed the role of museum curator at MoMA for her husband, Beaumont Newhall, in the new department during his service in World War 2 (1942-1946). During her tenure, she curated many groundbreaking exhibitions including one for her friend “Helen Levitt: Photographs of Children,” 10th March – 18th April, 1943. Nancy also continued her own photography and writing during that time and became a committed conservationist.
After the war, when Edward Steichen took over the department, the Newhalls left and spent three summers teaching at the liberal arts college Black Mountain College. Here, Nancy photographed the college campus and its people, including teachers Anni Albers, Buckminster Fuller, and Carol Brice Singer, among numerous others.
She published her first major book, Time in New England – a monograph of Paul Strand’s photography – in 1950, and edited This Is the American Earth in 1960, with Ansel Adams. Her photobooks pioneered a new style, with dramatic layouts and design, pairing photographs with mystical, lyric poetry or quotes instead of descriptive captions.
Together with Adams and her husband, she taught five summer workshops at the University of California, Santa Cruz, entitled “Images and Words, The Making of a Photographic Book”(1967-1971).
In 1974, Nancy died aged 66 in an accident while rafting on the Snake River in Grand Teton National Park. Her photographic work – of nature, people, and industry, depicted via graphically bold compositions – was exhibited and published posthumously in A Literacy of Images (2008).
Her work is archived at the Center for Creative Photography and the Getty Research Institute. Scheinbaum & Russek LTD, Santa Fe, NM hold the rights to her archive.
By Paula Vellet
