In December 2005, Denver’s Gallery Sink presented Early Colorado Contemporary Photography—a remembrance and revival of Winter Prather, Jim Milmoe, Walter Chappell, Arnold Gassan, Nile Root, and Syl Labrot. According to a statement by Root, the six men were all linked in one way or another to the mystically influential photographer Minor White during the 1950s.
In the coming months I will post a profile of each person in that so-called Minor White Group. I am beginning with Syl Labrot (1929–1977), whose career path began in Boulder and is fascinating to trace.
How, for instance, did his own artwork develop from this …
To this? …
Labrot began a career in commercial photography while studying Political Science at CU Boulder in the late forties. He was ambitious and pragmatic, shooting Ektachrome slides “because there was much more money in color.” [1] He admits that early in his career he had no desire to innovate, but a meeting with Denver photographer Jim Milmoe helped change his mind.
Milmoe persuaded him to meet with the rest of the Minor White Group in Denver, and they helped him move beyond his “clichéd and embarrassing” work, as he later described it. Milmoe noted that by 1955, when Labrot sold several dye-transfer images out of a show for $75 each, his creativity had made “a 360!” The sales so encouraged Labrot he decided to travel east and try to interest curators in his work.
Syl Labrot: Untitled, 1958
He met with Minor White at the George Eastman House in Rochester. White was a close friend of Chappell’s and at the time was the Eastman House exhibition curator and editor; perhaps more importantly given its national exposure he also edited Aperture magazine. White gave Labrot his standard brush off to “keep working, this is just a start.” Nevertheless, Photographs of Colorado by Syl Labrot opened there the following August 1956.
When Syl Labrot left Denver permanently in 1958 he had two goals: to pursue his commercial career and “to do color work that was more creative.” He had begun experimenting with carbro printmaking, a process that yields rich, color images verging on the surreal. That paid dividends when he sold four prints to MoMA’s photography curator, Edward Steichen, and Steichen included him in a Recent Acquisitions show that winter.
Book cover for "Under the Sun: The Abstract Art of Camera Vision" by Nathan Lyons, Syl Labrot and Walter Chappell (New York: George Braziller, Inc., 1960.
The following year he and three other Denver group members—Chappell, Labrot, Prather, and Nile Root—were included in Photography at Mid-Century, a massive survey exhibition celebrating the tenth anniversary of the Eastman House. White was also included in the show.
Labrot, Chappell, and Lyons were included in an extensive survey show at MOMA titled The Sense of Abstraction that same year (1959). The show essentially previewed their work for Under the Sun, an artist book of photo-graphic abstractions by the three that was published in 1960.
Left: During a trip to London in 2018 I was lucky enough to see a partial recreation of The Sense of Abstraction at the Tate Modern. The installation featured images from Under the Sun and an enlargement of Labrot’s Tree Trunk (1959) to mural size, as it was in the MOMA show. Labrot described the original installation as “a beautiful hang.”
Despite his personal success Labrot was losing faith in abstraction. The MOMA show was poorly attended and reviews were mixed. His reaction when the show closed was that, “Photographs were supposed to be this great media documentation, and here’s this show that’s just screwing up your mind; are these really photos? That’s what most people felt, ‘Is this right for photography?’”
Syl Labrot, from Under the Sun, 1960
Labrot’s subsequent experiments with painting, photography, and graphics eventually led to Pleasure Beach, a dramatic, hand-pulled artist book printed by hand at the Visual Studies Workshop Press (where he taught) and released in 1976. Shortly after its publication Labrot became ill from cancer, and he died in July 1977 at the age of 48. A posthumous show was organized by his Denver colleague Arnold Gassan at the University of Ohio months later. [2]
Labrot’s legacy to Colorado photography can be traced to an artistic epiphany he experienced when he saw works by Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg in New York. Their radical use of photography inspired him to experiment with screen printing.
He created Pleasure Beach at VSW while Colorado College alumna Kenda North was studying there. (Labrot was on her final thesis committee.) In North’s opinion, he was “a part of the invention of color photography. … [Pleasure Beach] is very much about his ability to translate what he had on film to the half tone plate—it was almost like the grain of the film became the half tone dot.” [3]
Syl Labrot: from Pleasure Beach, 1976.
Denver artist John Bonath was influenced by both North and Labrot early in his career. North, he told me, “Became very well known for her technique of hand-applying synthetic color into dye transfer matrixes and making dye transfer prints that were very beautiful. … I learned that process from her and then I took off with it in my own work and taught it to my students [at CSU Fort Collins].” [4]
The circle was completed when I asked John about a 1979 print his titled Dinosaurs. He told me he used a diffusion technique known as “organic dot pattern” that he learned from studying Pleasure Beach. Thus, from Labrot to North to Bonath the legacy of Syl Labrot and the Minor White Group continues.
Syl Labrot: from Pleasure Beach, 1976.
[1] 1976 interview with Thomas Dugan in Photography Between Covers, (Rochester, New York: Light Impressions, 1979): 7–8. All Labrot quotes are taken from his source.
[2] Three Photographic Visions featured works by Lewis Baltz, William DeLappa, and Labrot. Trisolini Gallery, Athens, Ohio, May 10–June 4, 1977.
[3] Kenda North, Phone interview, August 3, 2017. North received her BA from Colorado College in 1972.
[4] John Bonath, Personal interview, June 2017; email May 2021.
The Colorado Photo History blog is the online presence for “Outside Influence,” a book project by Rupert Jenkins. As always, please leave a comment or a suggestion for future posts, and visit #Colorado Photo History on Instagram and Facebook.
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