Nancy Wynne Newhall (May 9, 1908 – July 7, 1974) was an American photography critic. She is best known for writing the text to accompany photographs by

Ansel Adams Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American landscape photographer and environmentalist known for his black-and-white images of the American West. He helped found Group f/64, an association of photographers advoc ...

and

Edward Weston Edward Henry Weston (March 24, 1886 – January 1, 1958) was a 20th-century American photographer. He has been called "one of the most innovative and influential American photographers..." and "one of the masters of 20th century photography." ...

, but was also a widely published writer on photography, conservation, and

American culture The culture of the United States of America is primarily of Western, and European origin, yet its influences includes the cultures of Asian American, African American, Latin American, and Native American peoples and their cultures. The U ...

Biography

Newhall was born Nancy Wynne in

Lynn, Massachusetts Lynn is the eighth-largest municipality in Massachusetts and the largest city in Essex County. Situated on the Atlantic Ocean, north of the Boston city line at Suffolk Downs, Lynn is part of Greater Boston's urban inner core. Settled by E ...

, and attended Smith College in that state. She married

Beaumont Newhall Beaumont Newhall (June 22, 1908 – February 26, 1993) was an American curator, art historian, writer, photographer, and the second director of the George Eastman Museum. His book ''The History of Photography'' remains one of the most signifi ...

, the curator of photography at the

Museum of Modern Art The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues. It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of th ...

in New York City, and substituted for him in that role during his military service in World War II. During the 1940s she wrote essays on popular art and culture for small magazines and journals, in which she called for a society more attuned to art, and particularly to visual art. Newhall was always more interested in a popular audience than an academic one; in a 1940 essay, she explores the possibilities of the new medium of television for popularizing the visual arts, suggesting techniques for teaching art and photography on camera: :.. . the cameras should approach an object as an actual spectator does, and, like him, be influenced by empathy. Long shots become closeups, the flow of compositional directions, and, with due care for the results on the screen, studies of detail and texture under dramatic lighting, are all ways of lending motion to motionless things. In another, she argues for the centrality of photography for understanding and teaching American history ("Research"). Newhall became close to photographer

during this period, championing his early work and regarding his controversial 1940s work, which juxtaposed still lifes and nudes of considerable beauty and delicacy with wartime items such as gas masks, with some anxiety. In 1945, Newhall wrote the text for a book of photographs, ''Time in New England,'' by

Paul Strand Paul Strand (October 16, 1890 – March 31, 1976) was an American photographer and filmmaker who, along with fellow modernist photographers like Alfred Stieglitz and Edward Weston, helped establish photography as an art form in the 20th century ...

. The work would begin a new phase for her career, in which she became a vocal proponent and a central pioneer of the genre of oversized photography collections. The best known and most influential of these is ''This Is the American Earth'', a collaboration with

, published in 1960. Like Adams, Newhall was involved with the Sierra Club, and wrote often about issues of conservation. Newhall was sometimes accused of political heavy-handedness on that subject—one uncharitable review of ''American Earth'' calls her prose "so full of Message that there is no room for poetry" (Deevey)—but her explication of the political context and motivation of Adams' work has been important for the Sierra Club and the conservation movement in general. Nancy and Beaumont spent three summers at

Black Mountain College Black Mountain College was a private liberal arts college in Black Mountain, North Carolina. It was founded in 1933 by John Andrew Rice, Theodore Dreier, and several others. The college was ideologically organized around John Dewey's educationa ...

beginning in 1946. In addition to lecturing and teaching, the Newhalls photographed the college campus and its people, taking portraits of Leo Amino,

Ilya Bolotowsky Ilya Bolotowsky (July 1, 1907 – November 22, 1981) was a leading early 20th-century Russian-American painter in abstract styles in New York City. His work, a search for philosophical order through visual expression, embraced cubism and geo ...

Gwendolyn Knight Gwendolyn Clarine Knight (May 26, 1913 – February 18, 2005) was an American artist who was born in Bridgetown, Barbados, in the West Indies. Knight painted throughout her life but did not start seriously exhibiting her work until the 1970s. He ...

Jacob Lawrence Jacob Armstead Lawrence (September 7, 1917 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter known for his portrayal of African-American historical subjects and contemporary life. Lawrence referred to his style as "dynamic cubism", although by his own ac ...

, and

Buckminster Fuller Richard Buckminster Fuller (; July 12, 1895 – July 1, 1983) was an American architect, systems theorist, writer, designer, inventor, philosopher, and futurist. He styled his name as R. Buckminster Fuller in his writings, publishing more ...

's venetian-blind experiment. Some of Nancy and Beaumont Newhall's work is archived at the

Center for Creative Photography The Center for Creative Photography (CCP), established in 1975 and located on the University of Arizona's Tucson campus, is a research facility and archival repository containing the full archives of over sixty of the most famous American pho ...

at the University of Arizona in

Tucson, Arizona , "(at the) base of the black ill , nicknames = "The Old Pueblo", "Optics Valley", "America's biggest small town" , image_map = , mapsize = 260px , map_caption = Interactive map ...

and at the

Getty Research Institute The Getty Research Institute (GRI), located at the Getty Center in Los Angeles, California, is "dedicated to furthering knowledge and advancing understanding of the visual arts".

in Los Angeles, California. Nancy Newhall's photography has been the subject of an exhibition in its own right. She died on July 7, 1974 at St. Johns Hospital in

Jackson Hole, Wyoming Jackson Hole (originally called Jackson's Hole by mountain men) is a valley between the Gros Ventre and Teton mountain ranges in the U.S. state of Wyoming, near the border with Idaho, in Teton County, one of the richest counties in the Unite ...

from injuries received in an accident which occurred on the Snake River of

Grand Teton National Park Grand Teton National Park is an American national park in northwestern Wyoming. At approximately , the park includes the major peaks of the Teton Range as well as most of the northern sections of the valley known as Jackson Hole. Grand Teton N ...

Major books

*''Photographs, 1915-1945: Paul Strand''. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1945. *''The Photographs of Edward Weston''. Edward Weston and Nancy Newhall, Museum of Modern Art, NY 1946. *''Time in New England: Photographs by Paul Strand.'' New York: Aperture, 1950. Reprinted New York: Harper and Row, 1980. *''A Contribution to the Heritage of Every American: The Conservation Activities of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.'' New York: Knopf, 1957. *(with Beaumont Newhall) ''Masters of Photography.'' New York: Braziller, 1958. *(with Ansel Adams)''This Is the American Earth''. San Francisco:

Sierra Club Books Sierra Club Books was the publishing division, for both adults and children, of the Sierra Club, founded in by then club President David Brower. They were a United States publishing company located in San Francisco, California with a concentrat ...

, 1960. *''Words of the Earth'', photographs by Cedric Wright. Sierra Club Books, 1960 *''Alvin Langdon Coburn: A Portfolio of Sixteen Photographs.'' Rochester: George Eastman House, 1963. *''Edward Weston, Photographer: The Flame of Recognition: His Photographs, Accompanied by Excerpts from the Daybooks & Letters,'' Edward Weston and Nancy Newhall, Published by Aperture, Inc. NY, 1968. *''The Daybooks of Edward Weston,'' by Edward Weston, edited by Nancy Newhall, v. 1. Mexico.--v. 2. California, Millerton, N.Y., Aperture, 1973. *''Ansel Adams.'' Sierra Club, 1964. Reprinted (with photographs) as ''Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light.'' New York: Aperture, 1980. *(with Beaumont Newhall) ''T. H. O’Sullivan: Photographer.'' Eastman, 1966. *(with Ansel Adams)''Fiat Lux: The University of California.'' New York: McGraw Hill, 1967. *''P. H. Emerson: The Fight for Photography as a Fine Art.'' Aperture, 1975.

References

Sources

*Deevey, Edward S. Review of ''This is the American Earth.'' ''Science,'' Vol. 132, No. 3441 (1960), 1759. * *Klochko, Deborah, Merry Foresta, MaLin Wilson, et al. ''Nancy Newhall: A Literacy of Images'', San Diego, Calif.: Museum of Photographic Arts, 2008. *Newhall, Nancy. "The Need for Research in Photography." ''College Art Journal,'' Vol. 4, No. 4 (1945), 203-206. *—. "Television and the Arts." ''Parnassus,'' Vol. 12, No. 1 (1940), 37-38. *Sternberger, Paul. "Reflections on Edward Weston's 'Civilian Defense.'" ''American Art,'' Vol. 17, No. 1 (2003), 48-67.

External links

''Nancy Newhall, Tioga Mine, California'' photo by Ansel Adams
* Finding Aid for Beaumont and Nancy Newhall papers, 1843-1993 at the Getty Research Institute
Finding aid for the Beaumont and Nancy Newhall collection, 1930 - 1983 at the Center for Creative Photography, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ.
{{DEFAULTSORT:Newhall, Nancy 1908 births 1974 deaths American art critics American women journalists Photography critics Women science writers American women critics Sierra Club people Smith College alumni 20th-century American non-fiction writers 20th-century American women writers American nature writers Historians of photography