Part One of “Golden Aspen Days” introduced the 1951 photo conference (aka seminar or retreat). Part Two delves into the program of panels and field trips, illustrated by images from Robert C. (Bob) Bishop, Bill Belknap, and Christina Gardner. [1]
Bill Belknap: Clockwise from top left, Ferenc Berko, Dorothea Lange, Laura Gilpin with Ansel Adams, Fritz Kaeser, Constance Steele. Compilation courtesy of James Baker; copyright Bill Belknap Collection, NAU.PH.96.4.324, Cline Library. Special Collections and Archives Dept.
Bill Belknap: Aspen 1951. NAU.PH.96.4.324. Northern Arizona University. Cline Library.
Dorothea Lange’s assistant, Christina Gardner, describes Belknap as “a desert rat” with an “explorer’s mentality” who camped out in his station wagon during the conference. During WWII, Belknap had been assigned to the White House, where he photographed Presidents Roosevelt and then Truman. He operated a photo business in Boulder City, NV., and also photographed and wrote for National Geographic, Argosy, and Life magazines, among others. Working with a 2 1/4 camera, he took dozens of individual portraits both inside and out, and also some street scenes that show just how small and ramshackle Aspen was in 1951 (left).
Left: Photograph of Dorothea Lange by Christina Gardner. Lange was frail and recovering from a long illness at the time of the conference. Courtesy of James Baker; Right, photograph by Bill Belknap. NAU.PH.96.4.324. Northern Arizona University. Cline Library.
As the conference’s unofficial “staff photographer,” Bob Bishop (1921–2017) documented panels and social events, and created the iconic photograph of conferees in the Hotel Jerome lobby. When he arrived in Aspen he was living in California and had just completed courses in art, design, and architecture at Stanford University. After the retreat he took workshops with Ansel Adams and Minor White; he was living in Denver in the late fifties when he founded his very successful postcard business.
His daughter Laura writes that he sold postcards in drug stores, bookstores, grocery stores, gas stations, visitor centers, hotel lobbies, sporting goods stores, small tourist shops etc; his images appeared on postcards, notecards, posters, brochures, slides, placemats, 8x10 photos, in calendars, magazines, books and Christmas cards. Today, Bishop’s postcards can easily be found in antique malls and in volumes of travel-related publications. A short film by Mark Johnstone and Jack Lucido about his life and career called “Wish You Were Here” was released in 2016. [2]
There are at least three variations of Bishop’s celebratory group portrait of conferees. Author attributions vary but the version below is without doubt the best, the most published, and the 100% verifiable as a Bishop photograph.
Photograph by Robert C. Bishop: Aspen conference, Jerome Hotel, Aspen, 1951. © Robert C. Bishop Photography LLC 2021. L-R: Front Row (lying down): Will Connell, Wayne Miller; Middle Row: Milly Kaeser, Ansel Adams, Dorothea Lange, Walter Paepcke, Berenice Abbott, Frederick Sommer, Nancy Newhall, Beaumont Newhall; Back Row: Herbert Bayer, Eliot Porter, Joella Bayer, Aline Porter, Marion Frances Vanderbilt, Minor White, Constance Steele, John Morris, Ferenc Berko, Laura Gilpin, Fritz Kaeser, Paul Vanderbilt.
Anne Wilkes Tucker interviewed eight of the attendees who appear in Bishop’s photograph. In an Aperture essay published in 2008, she summarizes them as “mid-career impish, a few years yet away from the eminence most of them would achieve.” Assessing the image’s hold on her she wrote that, “It’s their palpable joy that brings me pleasure each time I view this picture.” [3]
Bob Bishop describes the group as having been “glued together by people like Ansel Adams, Minor White, and Wayne Miller.” He had obviously told them all to bring the tools of their various trades to the shoot: Ansel Adams is weighed down by multiple cameras, Beaumont Newhall has a typewriter on his lap, and Laura Gilpin crouches next to an enormous 8 x 10 view camera (in photos taken on field trips she invariably has a 2 1/4 around her neck).
Photo editor John Morris holds a book of Ansel’s photographs (upside down) while next to him Constance Steele, an employee of Walter Paepcke’s Container Corporation who had been brought in to keep the conference on schedule, holds a microphone. At center, Paepcke holds what appears to be a Native American drum—a symbol, perhaps, of his playful induction into the photographers’ “tribe” during a ceremony at his home.
Photograph by Robert C. Bishop: Beaumont Newhall inducting Walter Paepcke into the “tribe” of photographers at a cocktail party. © Robert C. Bishop Photography LLC 2021.
Two of the more fractious panels were likely “Photography and Painting” chaired by Sommer with Adams, Berko, and White; and “The Evolution of A New Photographic Vision” led by White with Abbott, Adams, and Vanderbilt. Both talks raised the comparative merits of abstraction and experimental photography and may have been programmed in response to Abstraction in Photography, a show curated by Edward Steichen for MoMA that same year.
According to Sommer, Berenice Abbott denounced abstract photography as being an “imitation of painting” and “the final fling of Pictorialism.” Both Abbott and her fellow documentarian Dorothea Lange, Sommer felt, were “acting as if reality itself did not accommodate imagination.” Interestingly, however, an alternate version of the lobby photograph shows Abbott with her arm linked through Sommer’s, indicating that friendship prevailed despite their ideological differences.
Photograph by Robert C. Bishop: Panel with Ansel Adams, Frederick Sommer, Ferenc Berko, and Minor White. Dorothea Lange in white hat, next to Fritz Kaeser. © Robert C. Bishop Photography LLC 2021. The panels were all recorded but the recordings are assumed to be lost.
Closing day, Saturday, October 6, was devoted to a general discussion and summary of the previous ten-days’ program. The October 11, 1951 Aspen Times reports that a “rousing” vote to return the following year was made. A three-point proposal was approved, i) for the establishment of picture sources; ii) to compile a bibliography of photo books; and iii) to establish a master file of transparencies from important negatives.
Despite the positivity, plans for a 1952 conference were shelved. The most tangible consequence of the retreat was undoubtedly the country’s first, and still most influential, contemporary fine art photography publication, Aperture magazine. Newhall writes that during the conference, “It was Ansel Adams who clarified our ideas, expressing the need for a professional society with a dignified publication. We discussed this informally quite a bit, feeling that what was greatly needed was a periodical in which we could talk about photography and learn from one another. The next year, nine of us met at Ansel and Virginia’s house in San Francisco and officially founded Aperture.”
Photograph by Robert C. Bishop: Aspen conference, Jerome Hotel, Aspen, 1951. © Robert Bishop Photography LLC 2021. L-R: Herbert Bayer (facing camera), Aline Porter, Will Connell, Wayne Miller, Ferenc Berko, Joelle Bayer, Eliot Porter (taking photo), Nancy Newhall, Beaumont Newhall, Minor White (back to camera).
James Baker interviewed Christina Gardner in 2003. These extracts from their conversation, taken from his notes, give a vivid impression of her experiences in Aspen: “Dorothea kept pestering me to go. [It] sounded terrible and maudlin. ‘No,’ she said, ‘you must go.’ My trip changed my life. I didn’t realize the significance of it at that time. My life, I was never able to utilize the photographic background I had. But the conference was so stimulating, I saw there was a big world out there beyond marriage. I came back destitute but to a better job. .... It was an obscure conference and no one paid much attention to it at the time.”
By 1955, Newhall had developed a somewhat mystical take on the cancellation: “The reason may be, in part, that the magic of the “Aspen Idea” happens only in Aspen and those that attended were so swept off their feet that they could not communicate the magic to others,” he wrote.
The Hotel Jerome lobby in 2020. Photo by Rupert Jenkins
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Note: This post was updated April 24 with clarifications sent to the author by Laura Bishop.
[1] This account draws from transcripts of interviews conducted by Anderson Ranch director James Baker, who researched the Aspen event during his time there. My thanks go out to him for his generous help with my own research. Other quotes are from Beaumont Newhall’s account titled “The Aspen Photo Conference,” in Aperture 3, no. 3 (1955).
[2] “Wish You Were Here: The extraordinary postcards of the American West by Robert C. Bishop” © 2016 Robert C. Bishop Photography LLC.
[3] Anne Wilkes Tucker, “On the 1951 Aspen Conference Attendees,” Aperture 193, Winter 2008.