Photo Fun - of Replicas and (Re)installations

My “Outside Influence: Photography in Colorado 1945-1995” book is moving along the production line, and is scheduled to be released by the University Press of Colorado [UPC] in September. When we first exchanged emails last month the book’s designer, Tina Kachele, sent me down the rabbit hole by mentioning that she had taken classes with photo historian Peter Bunnell at Princeton, and that Bunnell had often spoken about Minor White. If you’ve read some of my early posts, you’ll know that White has a recurring place in Colorado’s post-WWII history of photography. His main contact here was his friend and colleague Walter Chappell, who was recuperating from TB in Denver in the early 1950s. [1] Chappell sparked a regular exchange of prints and critiques between his circle of photographer friends in Denver - who were mostly novices like himself - and Minor White, who was editing Aperture magazine and working as curator and editor for Beaumont Newhall at the George Eastman House in Rochester, NY.

The Denver group at the time consisted of Chappell, Winter Prather, Arnold Gassan, and Nile Root (joining them later were Jim Milmoe and Syl Labrot). Root writes that they met regularly at his Photography Workshop camera store, which operated at 5705 East Colfax from 1955 to 1960. The Workshop was actually his second store; Root opened his first, the Photo Fun Center, at 4126 East Colfax in 1952.

The panel above shows the 25-year-old Root outside of the center soon after it opened. [2] His business held a salesroom, rental darkrooms, and what might have been Colorado’s first fine art photography gallery - certainly it was one of the first. In his tongue-in-cheek narrative, he writes that as a “respectable” business person in a necktie, the Beat generation had passed him by, and that because of the advent of television, he “would go for days without seeing a soul in my store. Everyone was either looking for a TV set or looking at TV programs.”

Root’s describes his exhibits as “a strange mixture of camera club winners, newspaper photography, and avant-garde experiments.” According to a memo dated June 9, 1979, “even in the innocence of the ‘50s, that name [Photo Fun Center] was hard to live with, so as soon as I could I changed the name to Photography Workshop, Inc.” When he opened his new space in 1955, the gallery was far more spacious than at the center, with high latticed walls and three temporary walls hanging in the center. In some aspects, its layout presaged that of the Colorado Photographic Art Center’s first gallery (CPAC), also on Colfax, when it opened in 1965 (below).

Above: The Photography Workshop gallery, 1955. Photos and notes by Nile Root, courtesy of James Root; the Colorado Photographic Art Center gallery at 1503 East Colfax, 1965. Photo by Hal Gould/House of Photography, courtesy Juliette Wells.

Notably, Root writes that because he had “no standards of exhibition practice to go by, prints were never window matted or under glass, and they were usually mounted on cheap mounting board.” Remarkably, his displays were not so dissimilar from contemporaneous exhibitions at major venues like the Museum of Modern Art in New York (MoMA), where reprinting from artists’ original negatives, intrusive cropping, and haphazard installations were common practice into the 1960s. Syl Labrot, for instance, was so “furious” at finding one of his images hung upside down and another “incorrectly” cropped at MoMA in 1959 that he demanded his work be removed from the walls.[3]

Root notes that his images of the Workshop gallery (above) show a print by Chappell that became a cover image for Aperture in 1957. One could say that his friendship with White was a major factor in that happening, but almost from the start Chappell was an accomplished photographer with a keenly developed sense of composition. White in turn had an acute critical eye and only accepted what he considered the most accomplished imagery. This only emphasizes that not only was the Workshop crucial to developing the group’s technical skills, the gallery was an important first step towards promoting the medium to the public as a fine art. Again, this was a goal Root shared with CPAC’s founders when they established their organization in 1963; it was also a fundamental reason why White, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, and others founded Aperture in 1952..

Above: All images by Walter Chappell. Top Row, L-R: Aperture cover, Vol 5, No 4, 1957; Aperture cover, No 79, 1977; Opening of Doors, inside spread, Aperture, No 79, 1977. Bottom Row, L-R: Metaflora spread, pp 8-9 & 12-13; Minor White, Rochester, 1957. Courtesy of Aryan Chappell.

In 1960, Labrot and Chappell were included in The Sense of Abstraction, a survey show at MoMA in New York City. This time, Labrot was pleased with the installation. In what he described as a “beautiful hang,” a section of his Tree Trunk image (1959) was enlarged to mural size close to the entrance.[4] This brings me full circle to my own exhibition now at the University of Denver, because I replicated MoMA’s use of his mural for my own show. Actually, mine was a replica in homage to a replica, because the Tate Modern in London used the same design strategy in 2018. (The three iterations are shown below).

Above: Three installations of Syl Labrot’s Tree Trunk, 1959. Top Row, L-R: (1, 2) The Sense of Abstraction at MoMA, NY, Feb-April, 1960; (3) The Shape of Light, 100 Years of Photography & Abstract Art, at Tate Britain, May-October 2018; Outside Influence at the Vicki Myhren Gallery (VMG), University of Denver, March-April 2025. The second VMG image also shows works by Elisabeth Relin (center) and Barbara Houghton (right). [6]

Before I close I just want to mention a couple of incidental yet significant details in Nile Root’s document. Firstly, he describes Walter Chappell arranging an exhibition of Minor White’s Intimations of Disaster series at the Workshop gallery when White was preparing to relocate from San Francisco to Rochester. This would actually date it to 1953, when Root’s gallery was at the Photo Fun Center, so let’s just say it’s an unreliable chronology, which to be honest is not so unusual. He describes the prints being mounted on several 4 x 4 ft. masonite panels; given that there were at least 18 images in the sequence I imagine it must have been enormously heavy, and somewhere in my clippings I seem to recall a reference to them not being returned in good time or in good condition. Sadly, Root doesn’t include a photograph of the installation.

Another reference is to his wife Mary “patiently (?) spotting prints made from Minor White negatives points to the normal practice of artists sending their negatives to museums and even galleries like Root’s to be printed. An anecdote in Eric Sandeen’s study of The Family of Man exhibition relates Ansel Adams nervously printing from Arnold Genthe’s original negatives; [5] I assume Syl Labrot’s images were badly cropped while being printed at MoMA; and in a contemporary version, I reprinted Labrot’s Tree Trunk (with permission) from digital files obtained from his archive at the Visual Studies Workshop.

Reprinting old analog work from digital files is certainly standard practice today. There are numerous instances in my show of artists either wanting or needing to reprint their original works. The quality is so good that I can’t complain about any of them other, maybe, than the practice of sizing up, yet questions still nag at me. Is bigger better? Is it possible to prefer a faded C print over a vibrant digital version? Are the blacks black or purple? Is the emotional connection to the viewer as strong? To my mind, analog originals are surely preferable if they are available; but if not, those questions about their digital replacements are sure to linger until all traces of analog are long gone.

[1] See Peter Bunnell, “Walter Chappell: Time Lived,” Inside the Photograph: Writings on Twentieth Century Photography (New York: Aperture Foundation, 2006), 132.

[2] Nile Root images courtesy of James Root.

[3] Labrot quote in Thomas Dugan, Photography Between Covers (Rochester, NY: Light Impressions, 1979), 10. Labrot was also aggravated that his work was “smashed right in … next to a bunch of color” that he found “horrible.”

[4] The Sense of Abstraction, organized by Grace Mayer and Kathleen Haven and exhibited at MoMA, February–April 1960. Later that year abstractions by Labrot, Chappell, and Nathan Lyons were published as Under the Sun: The Abstract Art of Camera Vision (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1960).

[5] Eric Sandeen, Picturing an Exhibition: The Family of Man and 1950s America (Albuquerque: UNM Press, 1995.

[6] Sense of Abstraction images from MoMA exhibition archives at www.moma.org; Tate Modern images by the author; Syl Labrot image courtesy of Barbara Wilson D’Andrea; VMG installation images courtesy of the gallery.

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.

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