Beyond the MoMA and Straight Photography

The Newhalls and Social Documentary Between the Great Depression and Cold War

Ya’ara Gil Glazer

p. 357-373


Texte intégral

1First published in 1938, the Newhall History is a common metonymy for the best-known history book of the medium in the 20th century, based on a seminal exhibition launched in the previous year. With formal education in art history, MoMA librarian Beaumont Newhall studied photography’s history independently at a time when it was not yet taught academically, and quickly became the museum’s first photography curator, in 1940. His partner and future wife, Nancy, worked both with him and separately. She became an influential photography theoretician as well as curator, starting out at the MOMA, although her achievements are often described under his shadow. For example, the Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography dedicates several pages to ‘Beaumont Newhall’,1 mentioning Nancy only within them. Her extensive work was cut short by her premature death in 1974; Beaumont kept publishing almost until his own demise in 1993.2

2The Newhalls’ career skyrocketed in the 1930s a decisive period in which photography’s uses expanded and an extremely wide range of techniques and styles developed, globally referred to as the ‘New Vision’.3 This rapid development occurred against the backdrop of the Great Depression, as well as the rise of fascism in Europe, followed by WWII and America’s transformation from a rural to an urban, industrial society. These lay the groundwork for the development of social documentation in particular, ranging between a reformist and activist approach.4 After the war, together with American art in general, American photography redirected its creative energies to the personal, subjective level. This was related both to the Cold War, in which social artistic expression became illegitimate and even dangerous in the US, and to the growing status of photography as ‘fine art’.5 Indeed, during these years, MoMA the ‘ultimate institutional arbiter of the entire range of photographic practice’6 highlighted the formalist qualities of photographs and also shaped the new academic photography programs in that regard.7

3In recent decades, the Newhalls’ projects have been discussed mainly in critical reference to Beaumont’s history book and the exhibition on which it was based. They were attacked as employing a traditional art-historical approach in highlighting individual photographers and the formal-aesthetic aspect of their works. The Newhalls were also criticized for their disproportional emphasis on ‘straight photography’—an approach that focused on significant qualities of the medium such as angles, sharpness, and tone range.8

4This recent criticism, I argue, has diverted attention from a significant aspect in the couple’s career: their major contribution to defining and shedding new light on documentary photography. In the 1930s—when America was in the midst of a social crisis that tested its values and very survival—photographers and theoreticians debated that concept’s meanings and roles; some ‘defended’ it against the proponents of pictorialist photography, whereas others considered it as no more than an imitative genre.

5Better known for having promoted photography to a status equal to that of the other fine arts, Beaumont was an avid supporter of the documentary photography agency of the New Deal’s progressive Resettlement Administration (subsequently the Farm Security Administration—henceforth RA/FSA), which he considered a ‘distinct style’.9 Nancy, known mainly as having promoted the careers of art-photographers who espoused straight photography, such as Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams, was an even more passionate and radical proponent of social documentation. This is evident mainly in two image-text projects in which she collaborated with Adams—one of which is discussed below—and in her support for the activist New York Photo League (1936–1951) and several texts she published in its radical bulletin Photo Notes. The Newhalls’ support for social documentary photography was expressed most significantly and critically outside the museum. Towards the late 1940s, however, their work was anaesthetized, so to speak, probably by the Cold War red-baiting atmosphere.

6The article’s aim is to examine the Newhalls’ approaches to documentary photography—inside and outside the MoMA—and to shed light on their significant contribution to its historiography and theory, together and separately. It places these approaches within a historical context stretching from the progressive Great Depression through the silencing patriotism of WWII to the culturally oppressive Cold War. The article’s secondary aims are to address the postmodernist attacks on the Newhall History’s alleged formalist focus, and to emphasize Nancy’s role as a supporter of radical social documentary photography. These are addressed in a discussion of documentary photography in the Newhall History, and a social documentary project in which Nancy collaborated with Adams.

The Newhalls: Couple and colleagues

7Nancy Winne Parker and Beaumont Newhall were both born in 1908 in Lynn, MA. Beaumont’s mother owned a portrait photography studio, and he grew up to be an amateur photographer. In the early 1930s, as an art-history graduate student in Harvard, he made an independent study of the history of photography—then in its infancy, Eurocentric, and focused mainly on the chemical-physical rather than the expressive-creative aspect of the medium.10 During his studies, he was appointed lecturer at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and later also studied at the University of Paris and the Courtauld Institute of Art in London. In 1935, he began working as a librarian in the recently established MoMA, the only American museum that regularly presented photography exhibitions at that time.11

8Nancy graduated from Smith College where she excelled in painting and writing. Following her acquaintance with Beaumont in 1933, she began taking interest in photography. Indeed, according to Beaumont, Nancy used to say, ‘When I married Beaumont, I married Photography’.12 They were wed in 1936, the same year when Beaumont was asked by MoMA’s first director Alfred Barr to curate a comprehensive retrospective exhibition of the history of photography. From that point on, Nancy abandoned painting and joined her husband in studying and selecting the works for the exhibition.13 Note that she received no credit for that in the book based on the exhibition catalogue, apart for the acknowledgements.

9The exhibition, ‘usually cited as a crucial step in the acceptance of photography as a full-fledged museum art’14—was the starting point of Beaumont’s career at the MoMA. In 1940, he was appointed the first curator of the new Photography Department, a position in which he served officially until 1947, but between 1942–5 Nancy was appointed acting curator and served in that capacity while Beaumont served in an Army Air Force photographic reconnaissance unit.

10During the war, the Newhalls, together with Adams, created a plan for the department’s next five years, and at the same time had to struggle to win departmental status for photography, as well as budget.15 In 1947, Beaumont made a significant career move: he left the MoMA upon finding out that Edward Steichen had been appointed Director of the Photography Department. Their conflicting approaches to the medium were demonstrated by two major exhibitions led by Steichen during Beaumont’s absence, while excluding Nancy the curator: The Road to Victory (1942) and Power in the Pacific (1945). As their titles suggest, the exhibitions were simplistic patriotic propaganda pieces that undermined the Newhalls’ efforts to present photography as a complex expressive medium.16

11In 1948, Beaumont was appointed curator at the George Eastman House, where he served for the next 23 years, after which he lectured at the University of New Mexico until his retirement in 1984. In the post-MoMA years, Nancy worked as a photographer, curator, theoretician, and critic, and even developed the photobook genre as a writer and editor. She also published seminal texts on various photographers, and, jointly with Beaumont, collaborated with the George Eastman House. The Newhalls, together with several photographers, also founded Aperture in 1952.17

12Beaumont and Nancy worked on many individual and joint projects until her tragic death in a rafting accident in 1974. Their collaboration behind the scene was much tighter than what may seem on the surface, leading to highly innovative outcomes. These include representing a variety of photographic genres in an approach that was ahead of its time, closer in spirit to that of visual culture half a century later. With regard to Newhall’s formative exhibition, Phillips argued that it was not about the ‘old question of photography’s status among the fine arts’,18 but rather took that status for granted. At the same time, the exhibition and book continued the conservative art-historical tradition by creating a canon of ‘master’ artists and works. The Newhalls, moreover, became particularly identified with the genre of ‘straight photography’, in a way that overshadowed the complexity of their theoretical work. Since the 1980s, Beaumont was attacked by critics for dictating a paradigm according to which ‘straight photography’ was the ‘only good or true photography’.19 The collaborations between Nancy and the ‘rock stars’ of straight photography—Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, and Ansel Adams—were also criticized as subjective, ‘cliquish’, and elitist, drawing attention away from her theoretical contribution to social documentary photography.

‘Authentic’, ‘unretouched’, ‘persuasive evidence’: Documentary photography in the Newhall History

13The year 1938 saw the publication of Photography: A Short Critical History (revised in the 1949 edition to The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present)—‘the English-language text that has shaped thinking on the subject more permanently than any other’.20 Naomi Rosenblum described Beaumont Newhall’s book as ‘the best-known general history […] in the twentieth-century.’21 According to Robert Hirsch, it ‘defined the modernist [photographic] approach and introduced its artists to the public’.22 Until the 1980s, it had no real competition.23

14Newhall’s canonic history was a milestone on the road to recognizing photography as a significant expressive medium. Nevertheless, towards the turn of the century various critics criticized Newhall’s focus on the quality of the individual photograph, and for representing an art-historical view of the medium as developing from one master to the next.24

15These criticisms certainly have merit but importantly, contextual analysis shows that the book was innovative for its time, despite multiple problems identifiable in hindsight.25 As suggested by Mary M. Warner, the separation he created between photography and the ‘damps of pictorialism and the margin of art history’26 helped establish the history of photography as an independent discipline.

16In 1938, Beaumont also published a detailed article in Parnassus, on the ‘Documentary Approach to Photography’. In it, he referred to the coinage of the term ‘documentary photography’ by Scottish documentarist John Grierson, and went on to present a developmental narrative of documentary photography, from Mathew Brady’s Civil War photographs, to Lewis Hine, the RA/FSA photographers and others active in the 1930s, such as Berenice Abbott, Margaret Bourke-White and Willard Van Dyke.

17Beaumont referred to the social aspect of documentary photography, defining it stylistically as a method that ‘as opposed to the abstract desire to produce Fine Art, has resulted in significant photographic art’.27 He also referred to its contents, suggesting that documentary photographers tended to document people in severe socioeconomic situations, and claiming that if the photographs are not motivated by a serious sociological concern, then they are not properly documentary. Moreover, he emphasized the importance of the photographer expressing emotions towards the issue being documented, which is intertwined with its aesthetic aspect.

18Surprisingly, in the Newhall History published that year almost nothing is left of this impressive manifesto of documentary photography. It hardly contains any photographs of that genre, and the works of those who represented for Newhall the apogee of the genre—the RA/FSA photographers—are almost completely absent—as if the Great Depression has never swept the America that lay outside MoMA’s walls. Indeed, within the History’s first edition, the term ‘documentation […] was synonymous with straight photography or “purism”’.28

19The reason for this glaring omission was probably Beaumont’s desire to play ball with the establishment. Although his article does refer to social documentation as a complex and rich genre of art, it appears that the policymakers at MoMA the ‘ultimate institutional arbiter of the entire range of photographic practice’29—were still unprepared to adopt this radical concept. This assumption is supported by the fact that in 1939, Beaumont organized an exhibition of RA/FSA photographs that travelled for two years across 12 states, but was not presented at the New York shrine.30

20From the 1949 edition onwards, however, social documentary photography won a respectable place in the Newhall History. By that time, he already had independent control of the book’s contents and access to the George Eastman House collection. Newhall emphasized documentary photography as having a significant persuasive potential, and included quotes by photographers, critics, and intellectuals referring to the documentary approach. According to Nickel, moreover, in this edition he detached photography from the world of modern art and brought it closer to documentary cinema and journalism. In fact, the transformation was so radical, that Newhall referred to the 1949 edition in his memoirs as a ‘wholly new text’.31

21The chapter devoted to documentary photography in the 1949 edition is actually similar in spirit to the 1938 Parnassus article. In the first sentence, Newhall ties it together with the concept of straight photography—a compliment on his part. In that same sentence, he also refers to documentary photography as ‘sharp-focused, unretouched’ and as consequently having the value of ‘evidence or proof’.32 Subsequently, he describes the documentary photographer as aiming to convince and motivate—and thus, implicitly, as an activist. In addition, he discusses the artistic aspect of documentary photography, concluding that ‘Documentary is… an approach, which makes use of the artistic faculties to give “vivification to fact”’.33

22The term ‘documentation’ is discussed throughout the chapter, with particular focus on its social aspect. The definition is gradually constructed using examples for projects and works by social documentarians from the late 19th century and during the four first decades of the 20th century, with a focus on particular works. For example, to establish the documentary photographer’s role as persuading and influencing using photographs, he refers extensively to the works of Jacob Riis to improve the living conditions of New York’s poor in the late 19th century and Lewis Hine in documenting poor immigrants arriving in New York and the exploitation of child labor in the early 20th century, describing their works as ‘human documents’.34

23In addition to Riis, Hine, Todd Webb, Abbott, Bourke-White, and others, after having completely ignored the RA/FSA in the first edition, now Newhall devotes almost two-thirds of the chapter to it. In parallel with Stryker’s intensive effort in disseminating the photographs, he is probably the one responsible for the fact that in later decades, they became ‘synonymous with documentary photography’.35 The photography project of the RA/FSA is described in the context of the Depression, although—as in the other chapters—it highlights the role of ‘masters’: in this case, Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange. However, Newhall addresses in this chapter both content and form and the relationship between them, and even foreshadows the contemporary contextual approach, by stating that ‘However revealing or beautiful a documentary photograph may be, it can not stand upon its image alone. Paradoxically, before a photograph can be accepted as a document, it must itself be… placed in time and space. This may be effectively done by the context…’36 such as series of photographs, captions and written texts, whether on an exhibition wall or in a book.

24Nevertheless, all the developments described in the book occurred within a mainly White, male American context, a characteristic that did not change even in the 1982 edition. Moreover, examples for radical photographic work by the RA/FSA was excluded, apart for passing reference to the Photo League, without any visual examples. This was despite the fact that Nancy showed particular interest in the League and published several times in Photo Notes. In these articles, she emphasized the professional level of the League gallery and the importance of its school in training documentary photographers. In particular, she praised the leading figure in both the League and its school, Sid Grossman, writing that in his documentary workshop, ‘many students discovered the meaning of photography and their own relationship to it’.37

25The glaring gap between the fact that the Photo League is mentioned only briefly and indirectly in the Newhall History and is not represented in other books published by the power couple, and the fact that both were included among its leading members, was probably due to the Cold War atmosphere. In the aftermath of WWII, the League was persecuted by the FBI, and in December 1947, its name was included in a ‘blacklist’ of ‘totalitarian, fascist, communist or subversive’ groups published in the New York Times.38 Although Nancy formally denounced the allegations against the League in a telegram she sent with Edward Weston to Attorney General Tom Clark,39 she and Beaumont followed many others in cancelling their League membership to avoid being suspected of ‘communism’.40

26The next major edition of the book in 1964 saw few changes with regard to documentary photography. Although Beaumont expanded his discussion to also include European photographers such as John Thompson, August Sander and Tina Modotti, in the American context contemporary socially engaged works documenting 1960s milestones such as the protest against the Vietnam War, or the Civil Rights Movement activity, were excluded. The little Newhall offered was a photograph representative of Robert Frank’s distant and enigmatic social documentation, in the chapter ‘Recent Trends’. Such caution was typical of many in the American art world, particularly photographers. One example is Edward Steichen and The Family of Man (1955) exhibition in MoMA, which essentially dealt with human rights without announcing it publicly.

27Even in the 1982 edition, the documentary photography chapter remained almost unchanged, with the ‘New Directions’ section offering additional examples for distant social-personal documentation by such photographers as Diane Arbus, Garry Winogrand, Lee Friedlander and Stephen Shore. Activist social documentation from the second half of the century was thus represented only in new histories of photography, such as Warner’s.

Japanese and unequal: Nancy Newhall and the radical documentary imagetext

28Echoing Beaumont’s words quoted above, a short bio in the inner sleeve of Masters of Photography (1958), the Newhalls’ first officially joint book, said that Nancy ‘turned from painting to photography when she married Beaumont Newhall in 1936’.41 Although she did follow in her partner’s footsteps, she did not ‘fill in for him’ as usually suggested, but developed her own career. MoMA’s management and trustees were strongly opposed to her appointment as curator, but she came to be highly appreciated for her work. Nevertheless, her salary was only half that of her husband.42

29In her three years at the MoMA, Nancy curated no less than 12 exhibitions. Although the most prominent of these focused on straight photography, she also promoted various photographers representative of the social documentation approach, including Lisette Model, Helen Levitt, Weegee, and W. Eugene Smith, as well as women photographers including, apart for Levitt and Model, also Lotte Jacobi, Berenice Abbott, Barbara Morgan and Dorothea Lange. Together with solo exhibitions, she curated exhibitions on themes such as 100 Years of Photographic Portraiture and Action Photography (1943), as well as a comprehensive exhibition of photographs from the museum collection—Art in Progress (1944). Nancy’s approach was similar to that of Beaumont in that she referred to a variety of photographic media, including cinema and television.43

30More radical were two exhibitions focused on documentation curated in temporal proximity to Steichen’s aforementioned propagandist exhibitions, which provided a significant counterweight by presenting a complex and contextualized view of the war by two involved photojournalists: Tunisian Triumph: War Photographs by Eliot Elisofon (1943), and Pacific Report: Photos by W. Eugene Smith (1944). In her most radical exhibition, she presented photos by Adams from Camp Manzanar in California—one of those in which Japanese-Americans were relocated during the war out of fear of spying after Pearl Harbor.

31Nancy explained giving up on painting for photography in terms of her desire ‘to put my energies behind artists and causes I believed’.44 This statement is also representative of her work outside MoMA and mainstream photography—which is also less known—where her approach to social documentary photography could be seen in its purest form. In fact, parallel to her intimate and professional relationship with Beaumont, Nancy maintained another, more radical professional relationship with Adams. Two projects—an exhibition plan and a book they promoted during her time as curator in MoMA—attest to her activist passion. The first, mentioned above and elaborated further below, was on the relocation of Japanese-Americans, and the second was on Blacks in the US.45 At the same time, however, they also once again reflect the constraint of articulating radical views with care bordering on self-censorship, both in keeping with the museum’s conservatism and in keeping with the spirit of the wartime patriotism that foreshadowed the cultural cold war. Nancy and Adams’ caution weakened the thrust of presenting the first project in the museum, and in fact prevented the finalization of the second.

32Born Free and Equal, the Manzanar photobook, was published in 1944, following the exhibition Nancy curated at the MoMA that year. The exhibition was based on documentary photographs taken independently by Adams in the camp. The War Relocation Authority (WRA) was hoping the photographs would present the project as a success and would contribute to changing racist views towards the detainees,46 but Adams’ intentions were more radical and in fact pointed a subtle finger at the project itself as racist. Given that the issue was highly charged to begin with, Nancy struggled to present the exhibition at the MoMA, and after initially opposing her, the trustees agreed to allow it only after the exhibition’s title was rephrased to reflect their cautious conservatism: Manzanar: Photographs by Ansel Adams of Loyal Japanese American Relocation. Another compromise was locating the exhibition at the basement-level gallery.47 Finally, the preparations by Newhall and Adams were also made with great care, Nancy saying that they had to ‘have everything completely in hand—to allow no opportunity for anyone to accuse us of a production detrimental to the war effort’.48 Nevertheless, she was naïve enough to add that it was important to have ‘emphasis on the Constitutional rights of loyal minorities placed thereon to support one of the things for which this war is all about’—combining quotes about equality from Lincoln, Whitman and the 14th amendment. In that, she led the museum to threaten to cancel the entire exhibition, forcing her to censor most of them,49 bemoaning the fact that her ‘tragic and bitter counterpoint’ was rendered ineffective.50 In particular, photos of Japanese-American soldiers were removed and appeared only in the book version.51

33The book opens and closes with a series of stunning portraits and typical spectacular mountain landscapes by Adams, some of which were familiar from his earlier artistic career. In addition to individual faces/figures there are photographs documenting the camp, including the school, hospital, church, football court, and even house interiors. The photographs are accompanied by captions under each and brief texts on the camp environment and way of life, describing its geographical environment, history, and population, including short interviews. At first glance, the general impression conveyed reflected the WRA propaganda: good, well-functioning individuals who accept their difficult situation and even benefit from occupational training and employment by the government.52 In retrospect, Adams testified that some colleagues had criticized him for the fact that the people he documented seemed happy, without any evidence of the injustice done to them.53 Lange, for example, who also photographed in the same camp for the WRA, argued that Adams’ photographs touted the government line.54

34Nevertheless, criticism against the injustice done to the camp dwellers arises clearly from the book, including its title and opening quotes from the Declaration of Independence and Lincoln’s words on human equality—censored, as mentioned, in the exhibition—and mainly in the captions. In an article discussing types of text accompanying photographs, published in 1952, Nancy highlighted the caption as necessary for documentary photography, where the ‘photographer is primarily an eye witness and secondarily a creator’.55 She described the text as the ‘main literary statement accompanying a series of photographs’,56 standing in its own right and containing information not included in the photographs and their captions (p. 67), and emphasized that the caption ‘adds to our understanding of the image, and often influences what we think of it’.57 Finally, she added that the connotation invoked by the caption reinforce those of the photograph.

35In Born Free and Equal, this is evident in a photograph that is part of the series of portraits at the start of the book. The subject is a well dressed and smiling young girl, and the caption underneath asks, ‘Is her future only a hope and not an assurance?’58 (fig. 1). It is also evident in the end of the book, where the first stanza of Walt Whitman’s ‘To The Old Cause’ is quoted. In that poem, Whitman addresses the Civil War and the threat to democracy.59 It is followed by the last photograph a close-up of the face of a young Japanese man whose eyes look straight at the viewer in an expression that may be interpreted as part skeptical, part gloomy, without a caption (fig. 2).

Fig. 1: Ansel Adams, Young girl smiling (Oriental type), 1943, LOT 10479-8, no. 23 [P&P], Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC

Fig. 2: Ansel Adams, Yuichi Hirata, Manzanar Relocation Center, LOT 10479-1, no. 12 [P&P], Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC

36Throughout the book, moreover, the emphasis on the subjects’ patriotism in the captions serves the purpose of presenting their positive image, but at the same time highlights the irony and humiliation in relocating them to a camp that offers rudimentary conditions, far away from their normal routine. For example, ‘Americanism is a matter of the mind and heart’60 (fig. 3), or ‘Our president has said that every loyal American citizen, regardless of his ancestry, should be given the opportunity to serve his country wherever his skills will make the greatest contribution, wherever it be in industry or in agriculture’61 (fig. 4). The same is true of a portrait of a Japanese-American corporal returning from a training camp—including an additional close-up of the decorations on his uniform, the captions describing them referring simply to their visible content62 (fig. 5 and 6).

Fig. 3: Ansel Adams, Yeko Yamamoto, LOT 10479-8, no. 22 [P&P], Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC

Fig. 4: Ansel Adams, Richard Kobayashi, farmer with cabbages, Manzanar Relocation Center, California, LOT 10479-1, no. 18 [P&P], Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC

Fig. 5: Ansel Adams, Corporal Jimmie Shohara, Manzanar Relocation Center, Calif., LOT 10479-1, no. 10 [P&P], Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC

Fig. 6: Ansel Adams, Corporal Jimmie Shohara’s ribbons, Manzanar Relocation Center, California, LOT 10479-2, no. 18 [P&P], Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington DC

37Thus, despite Lange’s criticism, whose own camp photographs were censored by the military and therefore lacked influence,63 the explosive potential of Nancy and Adams’ exhibition materialized in their book. It was controversial and seen as disloyal and anti-patriotic by many.64 According to Gerald Robinson, the publisher himself was rumored to have burned many of its copies, probably the reason why it is a rare item these days.65 According to Nancy, who reviewed the book in Photo Notes, Adams chose the photobook genre because in his opinion, it conveyed messages more deeply and originally, as opposed to the illustrated article that had become worn-out and formulaic.66 Adams saw the imagetext as an alternative to modern art, which in a letter to Newhall he described as lacking in compassion.67 The main emphasis in her review was on the injustice to the Japanese, a point made for those who might have viewed the book as merely documentary. She even used the review to criticize the censoring of the MoMA exhibition, which weakened it ‘since its basic concept was the conflict between the warm humanity and the lyric beauty of the photographs with the dark records in the text—the bitter past, the broken promises, the present problems’.68

Nancy through the back door, Beaumont through the front: The Newhalls’ decisive role in the history of documentary photography

38In their joint and independent work as curators and theoreticians, Nancy and Beaumont Newhall were key figures in the historiography of photography in the 20th century. Both initiated decisive moves in promoting the status of photography both within and outside MoMA–the first mainstream public institution that devoted a permanent space for photography exhibition. Their careers peaked in a period that saw America at its economic worst, and American photography at its creative and activist best.

39Indeed, an issue almost completely marginalized in the extensive studies of their work was their significant role in promoting the status of social documentary photography, as well as in developing its theory and discourse. Beaumont did so primarily by devoting a central place to the genre from the second edition of his book the most influential history of photography in the 20th century—and previously in his seminal study that defined ‘documentary photography’. Nancy did so primarily in her documentary projects with Adams, in supporting the Photo League, and by promoting documentary photography in her MoMA years. Despite the problematics of canonizing master photographers—diametrically opposed to the very nature of social documentation—the Newhalls promoted its status and expanded its theoretical language and discourse, including on the relationship between content and aesthetics, and highlighted the activist mission of the documentary photographer.

40Nancy’s significant role in the historiography of documentary photography is another understudied aspect, particularly her social projects, which were more radical than those promoted by Beaumont. Having started her career in the MoMA’s photography department in the same position as her husband’s, but with half the pay, and published texts no less important than his, she is still usually described as basking in his shadow.

41At a time when the centrality of photography as an activist medium that had characterized the Great Depression was replaced by a patriotic and mobilized art world, intellectuals and artists who raised a loud social protest were taking a risk. The Newhalls were not included among them. They were privileged celebrities who cultivated their careers carefully, while at the same time acting for social justice and supporting social documentary photography wholeheartedly. Both made a huge contribution to promoting documentary photography as an innovative genre through the front door of the American art world and activist and radical documentary photography in particular through the back door. Beaumont saw mainly to the first aspect—Nancy to the second.

Notes de bas de page

1 Lynne Warren, Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography, 3-Volume Set, New York, Routledge, 2006, p. 1152–3.

2Ibid., p. 1151–4.

3 Naomi Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, New York, Abbeville Press, 2008, chapter 6; Mary M. Warner, Photography: A Cultural History, London, Laurence King, 2020, chapter 5.

4 Ya’ara Gil-Glazer, ‘“To put the camera back in the hands of honest photographers”: The activist pedagogy of the Photo League’, Photographies, 12/1, 2019, p. 19–44; William Stott, Documentary Expression and the 1930s, Chicago, The University of Chicago Press, 1986.

5 Lili B. Corbus, Photography and Politics in America from the New Deal into the Cold War, Baltimore, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999, p. 123; Martha Rosler, ‘In, Around, and Afterthoughts’, in Liz Wells (ed.), The Photography Reader, New York, Routledge, 2003, p. 263.

6 Christopher Phillips, ‘The Judgment Seat of Photography’, October, 22, 1982, p. 52; M. Rosler, ‘In, Around, and Afterthoughts’, art. cité, p. 269–71.

7 L. B. Corbus, Photography and Politics in America…, op. cit., p. 219.

8 Straight photography is described in the Newhall History as the ‘esthetic use of the functional properties of the photographic technique, the appreciation of both the camera’s potentialities and its limitations, and the divorce of photography from the canons guiding the esthetic principles of other types of graphic art’ (Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the Present, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 1938, 1949, 1964, 1982; here 1949, p. 143). It is opposed to manipulations in the photographic or printing processes as well as to pictorialist photography, in ‘seeking to render a vision of things… as they impress the imagination’, and thus no longer in ‘rivalry with painting’ (Ibid., p. 138).

9Ibid., p. 178.

10 Martin Gasser, ‘Histories of Photography 1839–1939’, History of Photography, 16, Spring 1992, p. 57.

11 L. Warren, Encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century Photography…, op. cit.

12 Nancy Newhall, From Adams to Stieglitz: Pioneers of Modern Photography, New York, Aperture, 1989.

13 Erin O’Toole, ‘Nancy Newhall and the Museum of Modern Art’, in Deborah Klochko et al., Nancy Newhall: A Literacy of Images, San Diego, Museum of Photographic Arts, 2008.

14 C. Phillips, ‘The Judgment Seat of Photography’, p. 31.

15 Peter Galassi (ed.), American Photography, 1890–1965: from the Museum of Modern Art, New York, cat. exh., New York, Museum of Modern Art, 1995 (Feb. 20-Oct. 8, 1997), H. N. Abrams, 1995, p. 30; E. O’Toole, ‘Nancy Newhall and the Museum of Modern Art’.

16Ibid.

17 Michael Baker, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall papers [finding aid], Los Angeles, Getty Research Institute, Accession no 920060, 1843–1993 (bulk 1929–1993), http://hdl.handle.net/10020/cifa920060.

18 C. Phillips, ‘The Judgment Seat of Photography’, p. 32.

19 Douglas R. Nickel, ‘History of Photography: The State of Research’, The Art Bulletin, 83/3, September 2001, p. 552.

20 D. R. Nickel, ‘History of Photography: the State of Research’, p. 550. An earlier version of the book was in fact the catalogue of the exhibition Photography 1839–1937, published 15 months earlier. Three revised editions were published in 1949, 1964, and 1982.

21 N. Rosenblum, A World History of Photography, op. cit., p. 341.

22 Robert Hirsch, Seizing the Light: A History of Photography, Boston, McGraw-Hill Higher Education, USA, 2000, p. 340.

23 Ya’ara Gil-Glazer, ‘A new Kind of History? The Challenges of Contemporary Histories of Photography’, Journal of Art Historiography, 3, December 2010, p. 1–19.

24 Stevie Bezencenet, ‘What is a History of Photography?’, Creative Camera, 208, April 1982, p. 485; M. Gasser, ‘Histories of Photography 1839–1939’; C. Phillips, ‘The Judgment Seat of Photography’; Julian Rodriguez, ‘History Man’, British Journal of Photography, 141, January 1994, p. 11–2.

25 Y. Gil-Glazer, ‘A new Kind of History?…’.

26 Mary M. Warner, ‘What Shall we Tell the Children? Photography and its Text (Books)’, Afterimage, 13, April 1986, p. 5.

27 B. Newhall, The History of Photography, op. cit., p. 4.

28 John Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution: A Cultural History of Thirties Photography, Champaign, University of Illinois Press, 2006, p. 81.

29 C. Phillips, ‘The Judgment Seat of Photography’, p. 52.

30 According to Raeburn, the 1938 solo exhibition of Evans’ works, American Photographs, prevented another exhibition of documentary photography at the same time (J. Raeburn, A Staggering Revolution…, op. cit., p. 188). However, there was more to it than that: the emphasis in Evans’ exhibition was not on the Depression, but on the formalist-straight aspect of his photographs (Ibid., p. 179–182). In many respects, this exhibition was far from embodying the ideal described in Newhall’s article, and the lack of reference to Evans’ RA/FSA work in the press release about the exhibition further supports the assumption that Beaumont adapted himself to his employers.

31 B. Newhall, Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography, Boston, Bulfinch Press, 1993, p. 147.

32 B. Newhall, The History of Photography, op. cit., 1949, p. 8, 167.

33Ibid., p. 174.

34Ibid., p. 172.

35 Alan Trachtenberg, ‘Signifying the Real: Documentary Photography in the 1930s’, in Alejandro Anreus et al. (ed.), The Social and the Real: Political Art of the 1930s in the Western Hemisphere, University Park, Pennsylvania State University Press, 2006, p. 6.

36 B. Newhall, The History of Photography, op. cit., 1949, p. 183.

37 N. Newhall, From Adams to Stieglitz…, op. cit., 1989, p. 63. For more on the workshop, see Y. Gil-Glazer, ‘“To put the camera back in the hands of honest photographers”…’.

38 Walter Rosenblum, ‘Where Do We Go from Here’, The New York Public Library, 1948, accessed December 2020, web-static.nypl.org/exhibitions/league/text.html.

39Ibid.

40 Rob Kroes, Photographic Memories: Private Pictures, Public Images, and American History, Hanover, University Press of New England, 2007, p. 136.

41 B. and N. Newhall, Masters of Photography, New York, George Braziller, 1958.

42 E. O’Toole, ‘Nancy Newhall and the Museum of Modern Art’; Alexandra Schwartz (ed.), Modern Women: Women Artists at The Museum of Modern Art, New York, The Museum of Modern Art, 2010, p. 196.

43 E. O’Toole, ‘Nancy Newhall and the Museum of Modern Art’; A. Schwartz, Modern Women…, op. cit., p. 212.

44 Patricia G. Fuller, ‘Nancy Newhall (1908–1974)’, Image, 18/1, March 1975, p. 1.

45 See Chase Clow, ‘The “Negro Book” of Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall: Photography, Race, and Civil Rights in Early Cold War-Era America’, The International Journal of Arts Theory and History, 14/2, 2019, p. 37–50.

46 E. O’Toole, No Democracy in Quality: Ansel Adams, Beaumont and Nancy Newhall, and the Founding of the Department of Photographs at the Museum of Modern Art, PhD thesis, The University of Arizona, 2010, p. 272.

47 Gerald H. Robinson, Elusive Truth: Four Photographers at Manzanar, Nevada, Carl Mautz, 2002.

48 C. Clow, ‘The “Negro Book” of Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall…’, p. 39.

49Ibid.

50 Anne Hammond, ‘Ansel Adams at Manzanar War Relocation Center, 1943–1944’, History of Photography, 30/3, Autumn 2006, p. 248.

51 N. Newhall, ‘Review of Born Free and Equal, by Ansel Adams’, Photo Notes, June 1946, p. 4.

52 E. O’Toole, No Democracy in Quality…, op. cit., p. 272.

53Ibid., p. 274, 277, 280.

54 Jonathan Spaulding, Ansel Adams and the American Landscape: A Biography, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998, p. 209.

55 N. Newhall, ‘The Caption: The Mutual Relation of Words/photographs’, Aperture, 1/1, 1952, p. 24.

56Ibid., p. 18.

57Ibid.

58 Ansel Adams, Born Free and Aqual. Photographs of the Loyal Japanese-Americans at Manzanar Relocation Center, Inyo County, California, by Ansel Adams, New York, US Camera, 1944, p. 23.

59 George Hutchinson, ‘Race and the Family Romance: Whitman’s Civil War’, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, 20/3, 2003, p. 134.

60 A. Adams, Born Free and Aqual…, op. cit., p. 59.

61Ibid., p. 84.

62Ibid., p. 96–7.

63 Linda Gordon, Dorothea Lange: A Life beyond Limits, W.W. Norton , 2010, p. 318.

64 Laura Wexler, ‘The Puritan in the Photograph’ in Michael P Kramer, Nan Goodman (eds.), The Turn Around Religion in America: Literature, Culture, and the ork of Sacvan Bercovitch, New York, Routledge, 2016, p. 150.

65 G. H. Robinson, Elusive Truth, op. cit.

66 N. Newhall, ‘Review of Born Free and Equal, by Ansel Adams’, Photo Notes, June 1946, p. 3–5.

67 C. Clow, ‘The “Negro Book” of Ansel Adams and Nancy Newhall…’, p. 47.

68 N. Newhall, ‘Review of Born Free and Equal’, p. 4.


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