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 and Edward Weston, but was also a widely published writer on photography, conservation, and American culture.[1]
Nancy Newhall
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Nancy Newhall 1942, photo by Barbara Morgan.
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| Born | Nancy Wynne (1908-05-09)May 9, 1908
Lynn, Massachusetts, U.S.
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| Died | July 7, 1974(1974-07-07) (aged 66)
Jackson Hole, Wyoming, U.S.
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| Occupation(s) | Art critic, museum professional |
| Known for | fine art photography |
Newhall was born Nancy Wynne in Lynn, Massachusetts, and attended Smith College in that state. She married Beaumont Newhall, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art 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.[2]
In another, she argues for the centrality of photography for understanding and teaching American history ("Research"). Newhall became close to photographer Edward Weston 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,byPaul Strand. 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 Ansel Adams, 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 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, Gwendolyn Knight, Jacob Lawrence, and Buckminster Fuller's venetian-blind experiment.[3] Some of Nancy and Beaumont Newhall's work is archived at the Center for Creative Photography at the University of ArizonainTucson, Arizona, and at the Getty Research InstituteinLos Angeles, California. Nancy Newhall's photography has been the subject of an exhibition in its own right.[4]
She died on July 7, 1974, at St. Johns Hospital in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, from injuries received in an accident which occurred on the Snake River of Grand Teton National Park.[5]