Almost two years ago, I wrote about a 2005 show at Denver’s Gallery Sink titled Early Colorado Contemporary Photography—a remembrance and revival of Winter Prather, Jim Milmoe, Walter Chappell, Arnold Gassan, Syl Labrot, and Nile Root. According to a statement by Root, the six men were all linked in one way or another to the influential photographer/Aperture magazine editor Minor White during the 1950s.
To date, I have only written profiles about two of the so-called Minor White Group: Syl Labrot and Jim Milmoe; belatedly, this post begins the process of revisiting the other four photographers, beginning with an example of images made by each of them early in their careers. The images come from prints loaned to me from the collection of Jim Milmoe, who passed away late last year leaving a house teeming with artwork, personal and professional prints, and memorabilia.
My long-term intention is to present some of Jim’s vintage midcentury prints in the Outside Influence exhibition at the University of Denver in 2025, and in the book, which is currently being peer reviewed by a university press (news of that to come soon, I hope). As this is more a sample than an in-depth profile I have limited the text to a caption and a few notes; in the months to come I will address each person’s life and career in more detail - I promise!!
Winter Prather: Bentley Hood – New York City, 1958, from Portfolio 1, gsp. 10 x 10 in., mounted on 17 x 14 in. board (signed on front, notated on back). Milmoe Family archive.
Winter Prather (1926–2005) was arguably Colorado’s most influential and technically gifted mid-century photographer. He was born in Pontiac, Michigan, and dates the start of his professional career to 1948, when he was a student at the University of Denver and exploring the back roads of Colorado to document pueblos, ghost towns, cemeteries, and industrial relics.
Solarization, reverse printing (positive as negative), collage, and double exposures quickly became typical of his trademark techniques. Bentley Hood is one example of his ability to transform industrial design into sharply defined abstractions that reflect his adoption of the constructivist “New Vision” approach. The image above is one of two versions I’ve seen - the other was included in the George Eastman House’s ten-year anniversary Photography at Mid-Century exhibition and catalog, presented in 1959.
Walter Chappell, Image Series III, 1957. gsp. 9.5 x 7.75 matted to 17 x 14. Signed and inscribed to Jim Milmoe on back. Milmoe Family archive.
Walter Chappell (1925–2000) was born in Portland, Oregon. His Image Series was photographed just before he left Denver in 1957 to work with Minor White in Rochester. Presumably at White’s urging, Newhall hired him to take over White’s curatorial duties at the Eastman House; one of his early projects was to help organize Photography at Mid-Century, which included his own work as well as pieces by his Denver friends Winter Prather, Nile Root, and Syl Labrot.
Although Chappell was a relative novice as a photographer, he was the creative force within the Minor White Group. His friend Arnold Gassan recalled that before Chappell left Colorado, he spent days “whipping out quantities of bad prints to take to New York.” But after just a month or two under White’s tutelage, he wrote, “the ugly prints disappeared, to be replaced by luminous, dark brilliant prints bursting with inner light. The transformation from painter to photographer,” he wrote, “was complete.”
Nile Root: Canyon Near Denver #29, 1964. gsp, 6.75 x 9.5 ins. matted on 14 x 17 in. board, initialed on front. Milmoe Family archive.
Although he is closely associated with the retail side of photography, Nile Root (1926–2004) was a dedicated photographer from the age of twelve. He started work as a fourteen-year-old delivery boy at Ossen’s Photo Supply in Denver, and in 1952, he opened the Photography Workshop photo store on East Colfax Avenue, which became a meeting place for the Minor White Group.
Root enjoyed some minor creative successes, such as an image in the 1959 Mid-Century exhibition at the Eastman House, but he chose not to pursue a career as fine artist. Instead, he says, he took to heart Ansel Adams’s advice “to stay in a field where you have equipment, where you have access, where you have darkroom facilities … and be your own patron.”
Root continued to run his store until 1960, when he built a new career in medical photography at Rose and Children’s Hospitals in Denver. In 1970, he relocated to Rochester to teach biocommunications at the RIT School of Photographic Arts and Sciences.
Arnold Gassan (1930–2001) spent much of his adolescence in Denver. He met Walter Chappell in New Orleans in 1948; Chappell introduced him to Minor White in 1951, and the two were reunited in Denver in 1954. About that time, he introduced Chappell to Winter Prather, and the three began their immersion in creative photography.
By 1960, Gassan owned his own studio practice specializing in architectural, advertising, and fashion photography. In 1962, the destruction of the city’s architectural heritage motivated Gassan to produce his first fully realized creative project, Denver Gone: A Document of Larimer Street (images above). Made from the back of a flat bed truck one sunny Sunday morning, the pawn shops, retail stores, bars, peeling signs, and late-Victorian facades he documented provide an invaluable document of a district cited for demolition as part of the city’s urban renewal.
Gassan’s life was fascinating in its range and complexity. Before he left Colorado in 1965, he hosted three workshops by Minor White in Denver (1962, ‘63, and ‘64). In 1967, he earned an MA from Van Deren Coke’s photography program at the University of New Mexico Albuquerque. He subsequently headed the photography program at the University of Ohio, Athens for twenty years before transitioning to a career in clinical psychology.
Over the next few months we’ll look at these photographers in more detail. Arnold Gassan images above court4esy of the Center for Creative Photography Arnold Gassan archive.
Thanks as always for your comments and emails.