Nancy Newhall
(1908 – 1974)
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We are not yet taught to read photographs as we read words. Only a few thousand, among our hundreds of millions, have trained themselves like photographers and editors to read a photograph in its multi-layered significance. Yet more and more photographers have discovered that the power of the photograph springs from a deeper source than words — the same deep source as music.
– Nancy Newhall
Nancy Newhall Biography
MoMA curator, writer, artist, and inventor of a new kind of book, Nancy Newhall, greatly influenced the development of photography as an art form. Today, more than 48 years after her tragic death, are her multifaceted contributions gaining the recognition they deserve.
Her husband Beaumont, the pre-eminent photography historian, founded the department of photography at New York’s MoMA in 1940. When he was called into service in World War II, Nancy Newhall took over his duties as curator for three years. She had to prove herself to a skeptical board, but she soon gained a reputation as a highly capable curator who was uncompromising in her vision.
A founding member of Aperture magazine, Nancy helped to conceptually shape the publication and was a frequent contributor. She collaborated with many of the photographic luminaries of the day—Ansel Adams, Edward and Brett Weston, Paul Strand, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Minor White—writing text to accompany their images for magazine articles and books. She pioneered a new genre of the photography book, one in which images are paired not with descriptive text but with allusive excerpts from poems, letters, and personal reflections. Photography, she believed, was its own language, one that must prove its relevancy as a mode of communication. Highlights of her many publications include This is the American Earth and The Eloquent Light by Ansel Adams, Paul Strand’s Time in New England, and Edward Weston’s Edward Weston: The Flame of Recognition.
Although she kept her own art private, Newhall was also a talented photographer with a personal and intimate artistic “voice.” She framed details from the natural and industrial world in tight, graphically bold compositions.
In 2008, her work was published for the first time in the book A Literacy of Images and exhibited in a solo show at the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego.