David DeHarport (1921–2001) was a photographer and anthropologist who worked extensively in the plains of Colorado and in Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly National Monument. After his graduation from the University of Denver in 1945 he began a PhD at Harvard University. His four-volume dissertation, “An Archeological Survey of Canyon de Chelly” (1960), gathered data from 367 sites and included 2,600 photographs of petroglyphs and pictographs.
Following a severe illness in the early sixties DeHarport retired and dedicated his time to photographing in the Eastern and High Western Plains—areas that he considered “artistically ignored” in comparison with the state’s mountain regions. Although he had grown up in Denver, DeHarport’s memories of his grandfather’s rural homestead in Douglas County stretched back to the pre-Depression thirties, when agriculture was largely human-powered and small towns flourished.
Photo by David DeHarport, Untitled, 1991. From Last Chance to Cope. David DeHarport collection, Ph.00501, History Colorado, Denver.
DeHarport’s handwritten biography archived at History Colorado notes that a brief immersion in “Salon Photography” at the Boston Camera Club in the late-forties had persuaded him to adopt instead “a strong abstract foundation for composition.”[i]
This is seen in a number of photographs from what he describes as his middle period (1950s–70s) that split the horizontal frame with industrial smokestacks and other vertical elements (Kevin O’Connell successfully adopted a similar strategy in his own work from the plains in the 1990s.) Not surprisingly, numerous images of abandoned buildings, leafless Cottonwood trees, and empty church buildings share an affinity with early modernist images made by Edward Weston and Walker Evans, and with the contemporaneous landscape studies of the Hispanic south-eastern border region by Robert Adams and Myron Wood.
Photo by David DeHarport: Untitled (Plains), 1950. David DeHarport collection, Ph.00501, History Colorado, Denver.
In the mid-eighties, DeHarport invited an inexperienced but talented photographer named Marscha Winterfield to photograph with him on his eastern excursions. Their work appeared at UC Denver’s Emmanuel Gallery in the fall of 1994. The show’s title, Last Chance to Cope, suggests the desperation plainspeople must have felt as mechanization and the consolidation of small farms threatened their livelihoods; in actuality it was named after two remote towns spaced along Highway 36, east of Denver, enroute to the Kansas state border.
Westword critic Michael Paglia described DeHarport and Winterfield’s collaboration as sparkling “with irony and deadpan humor,” a quality he situates in their images of vernacular signage and visual oddities such as a dilapidated house poised on a trailer, or a “huge, clumsy” mural of John Wayne in a “pathetic small-town playground.”[i] Because of her lack of experience, my initial impression was that Winterfield worked as DeHarport’s uncredited assistant, but Paglia discusses their work separately, as individual image makers; in fact, he credits her specifically with having a deft approach and making “unforgettable images.”
David DeHarport, Untitled, 1991. From Last Chance to Cope. David DeHarport collection, Ph.00501, History Colorado, Denver.
Information about Winterfield is hard to confirm other than that she was introduced to DeHarport by their mutual friend William (Bill) O’Connor, Senior Photographer at the Denver Art Museum who supervised her volunteer work in the photo department. [3] Three portraits she made of local businessmen are archived at the Blair-Caldwell African American Research Library in Denver. Her biography there is minimal other than to state that she took up photography soon after retiring from the workforce in 1985. Unfortunately, the History Colorado collection lacks any biography and attributes just one photograph, Abbott Church, to her, making it impossible to fairly evaluate her work in relation to DeHarport’s.
Photograph by Kent Meireis. Portrait of William O’Connor and David DeHarport, 1993. Source: Denver Post, October 19, 1993
Concurrent with Last Chance to Cope, DeHarport returned to Canyon de Chelly with O’Connor for the purpose of adding color imagery and updating his previous black-and-white documentation. To cope with varying light caused by weather and the need to emphasize contrast between faded pigments, they used either color transparency or black-and-white film shot with a 4x5 view camera. O’Connor’s transparencies had two distinct advantages: they accentuated delicate color nuances, and they were marketable to fine art collectors. Prints were sold from exhibitions at the Native American Trading Company in Denver and Foothills Gallery in Golden, while the Denver Museum of Nature and Science produced a video titled Walls of Time that played nationwide on PBS.
Photo by William O’Connor: Stick Swallower, across from White House Ruin, ca. 1990. Courtesy of the artist.
Due to O’Connor’s efforts, DeHarport’s archive (and that of his friend Winter Prather) is publicly accessible at History Colorado in Denver; a large portion of his imagery is also digitized and searchable online. From a curatorial perspective he will never be considered a great artist, but DeHarport’s legacy as a recorder of the cultural landscape is substantial. As a fine artist who leaned heavily on his anthropological training he generated an exhaustive record of Indigenous rock art, while also creating an invaluable document of the post-industrial plains region and 20th century Colorado’s changing way of life.
[1] Photographer’s handwritten biography, History Colorado, David DeHarport collection.
[2] Michael Paglia, “Mainly on the Plains,” Westword, September 7, 1994. Accessed November 2020. www.westword.com/content/printView/5054330.
[3] The photo department was non-curatorial and specialized in the documentation of museum holdings and exhibitions.
Note: Thanks to former curator Megan Friedel and former DeHarport Collection archivist Adrienne Evans for their help with my research into David DeHarport.
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