Back in December 2023 I posted an obituary and interview with the late Sandy Hume (born Richard Paul, 1947-2023). At the time I recognized Hume as being one of Colorado’s most important photography curators of the 1970s and 80s; since then, his daughter, Marcie has helped me salvage literally hundreds of excellent gelatin silver prints, and some Type C color prints, from his former home in Boulder. Thematically, they range from abstractions, street documents, candid photographs of friends, images from the National Western Stock Show in Denver, published as Western Man in 1980, and outtakes of imagery from a project on mining he curated with Barbara Houghton in 1977-78 titled From This Land: Survey of Mining in Colorado. (1)

Beyond images I found masses of photographic paper, contact sheets, 35mm negatives and slide transparencies, and - much like his mentor Garry Winogrand - containers of exposed but undeveloped 35 mm and 120 mm film. Intriguingly, researchers at the Aperture Foundation informed me that Hume had been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1977 for a project he called "Anachronisms: A Geopolitical Survey." Further web searches revealed that his work is in permanent collections at MoMA, the Smithsonian, the Getty, and History Colorado. Soon, hopefully, the Denver Art Museum will be added to that list.

As you can probably tell from the images in this post, much of the work I found in his archive would fit the “Anachronisms” theme. Most of the prints are unsigned and undated, and very few of the titles extend beyond “Untitled,” making it impossible to determine if any were created specifically for the Guggenheim-funded project. Realistically, just about everything he did fell into that theme in one way or another. Frustratingly, we’ve been unable to discover any paperwork pertaining to grants or artwork at his house. Possibly some information exists at the CU Boulder special collections archive, which I’ve been told holds some of his material. That has to be my next port of call if I want to delve deeper into Hume’s oeuvre.

The unifying strategy in the set of images above is obviously linguistic. Hume’s preference to edit within the frame creates wordplay whereby “Rant” is shortened from “Restaurant,” “Ices” perhaps from “Services,” and “Inks/Sters” from - well, your guess is a good as mine. A phrase such as “Me Too” carries a completely new relevance in the fifty years since it was taken, while “Swinger” - to my boomer generation at least - still conjures John Updike-like images of house keys in a party bowl.

Hume photographed extensively at the CU Boulder football stadium. One image published in John Szarkowski’s seminal Mirrors and Windows book may have taken there. The image, which I call “#28” but is listed as “Untitled (1974),” is one of four prints by Hume acquired by Szarkowski for the MoMA permanent collection. (2) Another image (let’s call it “#24”) seems to have been taken at the same time and place, with the same team. Whereas any subliminal message in #28 is ambiguous, the plaster cast and sense of exhaustion in #24 suggests the physical punishment endured by football players at any level of the sport.

Like #24 and #28, Hume’s abstract images rely on a combination of flash and long exposure that captures movement without blur. Taken together with a series of urban studies constructed around shadows and geometry (below) Hume’s winter studies place him in the sphere of several other photographers working prominently in the US in the 1970s, among them Lee Friedlander, Henry Wessel, and his mentor, Garry Winogrand.

Other “flash and jiggle” images made in winter during snow storms replicate Martin Parr’s approach to his “Bad Weather” series made in England between 1975 and 1982. For Parr, bad weather equates with rain and wind against which pedestrians huddle and strain, yet endure and cope - even enjoy. In contrast, Hume’s bad weather imagery is devoid of hope or enjoyment - in fact it is devoid of humanity and conveys little except cold and emptiness.

One subject area where Hume and Parr collide is literally the UK (below). Parr’s series of empty or abandoned Morris Minor cars is mirrored in Hume’s picture of a Minor-like car in a field. His snapshots of English people show them going about their routines, seemingly wrapped in a veil of British solitude - whether riding trains in stoic silence or communing with pigeons in Trafalgar Square.

Hume’s documentation of the National Western Stock Show, made ca. 1974-79 (below), is undoubtedly his magnum opus. Looking through his complete archive it is obvious that the book’s print quality and edit do an injustice to the range of images he produced. His B&W portraits are particularly strong, and it’s puzzling that so few of them are included in the book. Writing of his subjects in his introduction to Western Man, Hume explains that, “I have never found people more open to, and unafraid of, the idea of being photographed. The response to my photographic activity is usually a good natured “What-the-hell-are-you-doing-boy-with-all-these-crazy-pictures-and-who-you-work-for-anyway?” His agreement (unspoken it seems) was to give a 16 x 20 print to each subject whenever he saw them at the following years’ events. His proposition that they will show up in “antique shops of the prairie in a generation or so” is an intriguing one to investigate.

The sharp and stylish western clothing worn by many of his subjects lends a timeless quality to his portraits. Not surprisingly, hats are a defining factor, with the cowboys and cattle owners wearing clean wide-brimmed Stetsons and the ranch hands and vendors more likely to be equipped with farmer’s hats bearing logos. To my untutored eye western wear hasn’t changed in the fifty years since Hume’s portraits were made, so it the farmer’s hats that most convey a sense of passing time. If my idea of re-editing the book ever sees the light of day I must include an essay by a fashion writer who recognizes the details of each era’s piece of clothing!

The gallery below includes two scans of 5 x 7 in. work prints that identify their subjects. I’ve included them here alongside their equivalent “final” versions that were printed on 8 x 10 in. fiber paper.

From This Land: Survey of Mining in Colorado (1977-78) was his final collaborative project. He organized it with Barbara Houghton while she was teaching at Metro State in Denver and he was teaching on the same campus at UC Denver. Both contributed images to the project (Hume’s in B&W, Houghton’s in color). (3) Broadly speaking, Hume concentrated his lens on two elements: industrial equipment and the industrialized landscape. As of September 2025 these images are waiting to be scanned. A selection will be added here as soon as possible.

Ultimately, the Western Man imagery comprised Hume’s graduate thesis show (MFA 1978) For the bulk of his time at CU, he had been leading a double life studying in Boulder and interning with the Republican party in Denver. Sadly for the photo community, after he was elected to the Colorado state legislature as a Republican congressman in 1982, his artistic career essentially ended. (4)

I feel fortunate to be able to understand the extent of his personal and curatorial work. But in fact, reading that over I realize that “to be able to understand” is an overstatement. Realistically, it should be “to begin to understand.”

(1) Sandy Hume, Western Man: Photographs of the National Western Stock Show (Boulder: Johnson Pub. Co., 1980). Essay by Max Kozloff. Western Man was exhibited at Iowa State University after his thesis exhibition. The From This Land collection is accessible at History Colorado in Denver.

(2) John Szarkowski, Mirrors and Windows: American Photography Since 1960 (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1978), 24. Hume’s image is attributed to Richard P. Hume.

(3) Other contributors were Richard van Pelt, Gary Metz, Linda Connor, Roger Mertin, and Robert Adams.

(4) Hume won election as State Representative for District 13 (Boulder) in 1982. He was elected to the State Senate representing District 17 in 1988. According to state records, he last won election to District 17 in 2004.

Randy Brown’s documentary photographs encompass traditional architecture in Indonesia, human trafficking, PTSD and addiction among veterans, and the socio/cultural issues of climate change and drought, particularly the existential threat to farming and ranching culture, which in Colorado centers in the San Luis Valley and the overuse of water from the Colorado River. We recorded our first interview in October 2023 at the Rocky Mountain Center of Art + Design, where he has taught photography for 19 years.

Brown was born in Wichita Falls, TX, in 1951. He earned a Bachelor of Business Administration degree from Texas Tech in Lubbock in 1976, relocated to Dallas where he worked in the oil and steel business for four years, and settled in Denver, CO, in 1991. His work is in the collection of the Denver Art Museum and has been exhibited in more than forty gallery exhibitions over the course of his professional career, which now spans almost a half century. He was the recipient of a Hal Gould Vision in Photography Award from the Colorado Photographic Art Center in 2019. www.randybrownphotographer.com.

Randy Brown’s career in photography began in 1980 after a chance meeting at a going-away party in Dallas in the late 1970s. Hearing that he planned to traveling to Europe without a camera, a newspaper photographer gave him an old 35mm Vivitar and 20 rolls of film. Brown “took that with me and started taking pictures, just doing tourist stuff, trophy hunting, Houses of Parliament, Roman Coliseum, Eiffel Tower...” In Paris, he chanced upon an exhibition featuring the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson.

The whole concept of the “decisive moment” was new to him, and he was inspired to enroll in a Dallas Community College photo class when he returned to Dallas. His first subjects were abstracts of wires, rebar, utility poles and the like found in construction sites and side alleys, photographed on 35 mm Tri-X film using a 24 mm lens, whose “expansive view” was a “great learning tool” during those formative projects.

construction workers in denver, co — Randy Brown: Construction in Dallas, ca. 1981

About a year after his return, he bought a 1963 VW bus and headed west with the idea of going to Carmel, CA, home of Edward Weston and the Group f64 movement. Sidetracked by Colorado and the Southwest he settled in Denver instead and pursued a career in photography with a concentration on social landscape, architecture, and ultimately documentary image making.

One of Brown’s earliest engagements with Denver’s street activity involved the legendary Mudmen. In a case of “right place, right time,” he recalls that, “One day, the Mudmen just showed up on the 16th Street Mall and I happened to be there [with] 35mm transparency in my camera.”

The Mudmen were a group of Denver artists whose appearance was inspired by Irving Penn’s Three Asaro Mud Men, New Guinea (1970 - see Mark Sink posts for more on this). Brown’s image below shows them dancing ritualistically around chalked sidewalk markings, watched by a large crowd of onlookers. To the photographer, though, “They just appeared … and stayed, I don't know, less than a minute, gathered up [their stuff] and ran off to someplace else. So, that was my experience with them, and that's the only time I'd ever seen them. They were just there and then they weren't. It was sort of like magic.”

Randy Brown: Denver Mudmen on the 16th Street Mall, ca. 1982.

As in Texas, a group of photojournalists helped direct his career and build his community. He cites Ernie Leyba and Bill Wunsch of the the Denver Post, Linda McConnell of the Rocky Mountain News, and Anthony Suau, who won a Pulitzer Prize for work he made covering a famine in Ethiopia, as being particularly influential.

Leyba and McConnell both suggested he hang out at the Denver Press Club, where “writers and photographers flooded the bar and basement where the pool tables were.” Although Brown was working as a stringer for the Post and Rocky, and also for the Associated Press, he made his primary income working at B&W Photo, a photo lab near East High School. The lab had a contract with the Denver Public Library Western History Department (DPL), and he made contact sheets from glass negatives shot by Timothy O'Sullivan and William Henry Jackson. (This was actually quite a common job among photographers I’ve interviewed for this history blog. For instance, Thomas Carr, Gary Emrich, and Jay DiLorenzo all worked with 19th century glass plates at DPL or the Historical Society.)

Often, photographers at the Press Club would talk about their next day’s assignments, but as an unaffiliated outsider Brown found that unless he created something really unique, editors probably were unlikely to publish his work. His first big break came when “maybe a half a mile in front of me, this dump truck sort of exploded into flames under a bridge. I drove past the accident to get a better vantage point, right past this burning truck, and I … just shot the hell out of it.”

He took those photos to the Associated Press, located on Wazee Street. “Ed Andrieski was the photo editor and a great photographer for the Denver AP Bureau. He loved one picture in particular and sent it out on the wire. It was on the cover of the Rocky and the Post the next day and went out on the wires was published nationally. Then I got some calls from U.S. News & World Report, Newsweek, Time Magazine, LA Times – anytime they had something in Colorado, they would call me.

Protests against apartheid, US-backed conflicts in Central America, government inactivity to the AIDS epidemic, and rallies in favor of women’s rights, abortion, and the Equal Rights Amendment erupted throughout the US during the late Reagan years. Locally, contamination at the Rocky Flats nuclear plant was a pressing issue. In 1988, he photographed a protest at an MX missile site for Time. “There's hundreds of [missile sites], even now, in northeastern Colorado, southeastern Wyoming. Time told me that people were going to hold hands and surround this site.” During the protest, he photographed a group of nuns who had been arrested many times being detained once more (above).

He also photographed at conventions in Denver for the National Organization for Women and the National Right to Life Committee, which was Phyllis Schlafly's organization. The conventions happened simultaneously and were extremely contentious. Brown witnessed many clashes and protests that attracted many people from Schlafly's group with ugly and demeaning signs. “I think I shot 25 rolls for Newsweek,” he recalled, [but they only] used a couple of the images because they were deemed too graphic for a wide audience.”

Colorado’s anti-gay Proposition 2, which passed in 1990 (later overturned by the Supreme Court) was part of a nation-wide movement to deny legal and human rights to the LGBTQ community. Brown remembers that, “just prior to that there were a lot of films and television shows being produced in Denver. After Proposition 2, that work all dried up. Colorado still hasn't recovered from that. Hollywood moved to New Mexico [which has] incentives for their thriving film production industry. So that cost a lot of people their jobs.”

Eventually, the economics of his situation made work as a stringer untenable, so Brown turned to architectural photography (above). Brown developed a technique that involved photographing from the top of buildings using a jerry-rigged painter's pole that extended out to about 12 feet; by attaching his camera with a cable release to its tip he was able to create vertiginous downward urban landscapes.

The work started to be noticed after the Rocky Mountain news art critic Mary Chandler included it in a show at the Emmanuel Gallery on the Auraria Campus. “It was probably my first exhibit. Then, after Carol Keller she saw the exhibition she started showing my work at her gallery in the Lower Highlands.”

In 1994 he submitted a fly-on-the-wall series made at a restaurant called La Cupola as part of an application to Villa Montalvo near Saratoga, CA, southwest of San Jose. Once there he found he spent more time in traffic than photographing; inspired by the natural environment he was living in, he switched mediums and subject entirely to focus on self-portraits made by applying organic materials to paintings.

He continued to paint and photograph for ten years. Works made at the McDowell Colony in New Hampshire in 1999 (above) were shown at several galleries - DeLeon White, Carol Keller, Sandy Carson, William Havu - and two pieces were purchased by Jane Fudge, a well-respected curator of photography at the Denver Art Museum.

In 2008 Brown had the opportunity to work in Indonesia, Nias Island off the West coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean (above). His projects there explored the use of traditional structure of houses that were effective in earthquake resistance as well as how museums in earthquake zones protect their collections against earthquakes.

Above, portraits from In the Middle of Everywhere: Scant Water by Randy Brown. L-R: Andre Herrera, podcaster, musician, music producer in a small town of Capulin, Colorado; Noelle (?), rancher; Daniel, former ranching intern; Jason Medina.

Brown’s most recent activities concern water rights and water diversions of water resources from Colorado’s San Luis Valley to communities along the Front Range. The overall project’s title is “In the Middle of Everywhere: Scant Water.” Nine of his stories have been published online by the Alamosa Citizen under the banner “Faces of the Valley.” Brown’s photo essays are accompanied by interviews he made with his subjects. One typical example is his profile of Jason Medina, Executive Director of the Community Foundation of the San Luis Valley [click here].

He began Faces of the Valley in 2020, during Covid, which exposed the politic divide between urban and rural centers. “It was interesting to go down there, having been in the city wearing a mask everywhere, and nobody down there is wearing a mask. Immediately, [I knew that] if I walk into a barn-raising wearing a mask, nobody's going to talk to me.” Yet he found that MAGA and non-MAGA alike, the people he met were generally in agreement about water rights and the need for water conservation: As Brown told me, “That this is an issue that's bringing people together no matter what their economic class is, or their cultural background or politics are.”

Brown’s instinct for authenticity and connectedness, he thinks, came from his grandfather, who was a reporter at the newspaper in Wichita Falls. “When I was a freshman in high school I'd ride around with him. He'd go into a small town and would go to a barbershop and find out what was going on and then they'd say, "Oh, yeah, you got to talk to Hal down there. He's working on this old car, and this'd be a good story." And then Hal would say, "Oh, yeah, this other guy," and that kind of stuff. And I didn't realize probably until the last four or five years, maybe in the last three years, how much I got from him in regard to being curious. People trust me, knowing how to be authentic.

Randy Brown: Portrait of Rio de la Vista. “She lives on the Rio Grande. Interesting, Rio De La Vista having a great view of the Rio Grande.”

His fixer in the valley was Rio de la Vista (above), a community activist affiliated with the Environmental Law Center and the Salazar Center at Adams State University, Alamosa. Through her connections, Brown experienced the same chain of introductions he had experienced with his grandfather. Brown’s plan for the project was initially to trace the Rio Grande down into New Mexico and to El Paso - something that photographer Laura Gilpin also did immediately after WWII. Her documentation resulted in a book titled The Rio Grande: River of Destiny (pub. Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1949), which in turn inspired a San Luis photographer named Ruth Marie Colville to document the Spanish trails in the San Luis Valley in the 1960s.

Images above, Clockwise: Syana Coleville; Dean Coombs, publisher of the Saguache Crescent; George Whitten, San Juan Ranch; David Coleville and his daughter, Syana on the Corset Ranch.

The name Colville reappears in an interview published in the Alamosa Citizen that features Brown talking with David Colville and his daughter Syana on their Corset Ranch (images above). Asked about the effect of dwindling water, David describes a “chain reaction... Anaconda Ditch is now gone … the Meadow Glen doesn’t run at all. It might as well be shut down at this point. And now the Independent is the third one in line. It’s that chain effect, it’s not good.”

Where collectivity and activism present a solution, so too does grasping the reality of legal rights. Julie Sullivan, so-owner of the Whitten Ranch describes is thus: “[What] has come home to roost now, is the fact people assumed that their right to the water meant they owned the water, they had the right to use the water, but they didn’t actually own the water. I think here in the Valley people are trying to really understand the distinction between how they perceive their right to use the water with what they legally have.”

An extended portfolio of images can be found at randybrownphotographer.com. Brown’s website includes links to all the profiles and editorial content published online by the Alamosa Citizen.

As of Fall 2025, Brown continues to document the lives of people living in remote agricultural regions through photographs and interviews with farmers, ranchers, and those working in energy exploration (above). West of East: The South Platte River explores the juxtaposition of family life, its traditional Arapahoe people, a 150-year culture of agriculture and, recently, threats to the river amidst the largest oil and gas exploration, wind and solar energy generation arrays in Colorado.

The Colorado Photo History blog is the online presence for “Outside Influence,” a book project by Rupert Jenkins. Please leave a comment or a suggestion for future posts, and visit @coloradophotohistory on Instagram.

#coloradophotohistory @coloradophotohistory #outsideinfluence #randybrownphotograher.com #RandyBrown #sociallandscape #sanluisvalley #waterinthewest

Sandy Hume Part Two: Photographs

Randy Brown: From Texas to the San Luis Valley

Colorado Photo History

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