Colorado Photo History

Part One of my interview with Susan Goldstein describes her early years as student and her first job in photography as a staff photographer for Westword magazine. Part Two continues her story with the beginnings of her career as a landscape photographer, her introduction to digital color, and her most recent works created for Denver’s 2021 Month of Photography.

Susan Goldstein: from Undercurrents. Courtesy of the artist. — Susan Goldstein: from *Undercurrents*. Courtesy of the artist.

RJ: You shifted your work towards landscape in the late-80s, I think.

SG: I started the New American West in 1989 or 90. I was clueless, I titled it without knowing about Robert Adams [laughter]. It was Skip and Lisbeth Kohloff who, when they wanted to show some of my photographs at CPAC, said something to me like, “Well, I don’t think we better call it the New American West.” “Well, why not?” “Well, there's a photographer and his name is Robert Adams.” That’s when I realized how little I had been paying attention to the bigger world. In the beginning, the images that grew into the New American West were nothing more than me recognizing and photographing what was interesting to me. It didn’t take very long for me to realize that I was responding to human presence in our absence and making photographs with this as a common theme.

RJ: Can you explain that a little more—the human presence in our absence?

SG: That’s a phrase I’ve tried to work in when I try to write about the work. My feeling about the landscape is that it becomes infinitely more interesting, in a different way, when there’s some piece of human presence in the landscape. Something that is juxtaposed, that speaks to something that came before. That’s the thread that works its way both into the New American West and Undercurrents, which is the color landscape work. Undercurrents morphed into being about taking the temperature of the country by documenting “visual clues” I find in various communities.

Over the years the work has developed to include a few sub-categories of images, including a large group that are inherently political. There are no people in the images in Undercurrents. Every once in a while there’ll be a car, which implies a person in it, but what I’m seeking is the photograph of what we are without the humans in it.

RJ: I don’t want to get bogged down in technical matters, but New American West coincided with the introduction of digital photography. Was that something you adopted right away?

SG: The really early cameras were very expensive, and I waited until 2011 to buy my first full frame digital camera. But in that transition period, I was beginning to recognize some of the benefits of digital when it came to environmental issues and when it came to efficiencies. I can frankly say that when I hold one of my gelatin silver prints, it has a different kind of integrity to me. My old bias, I guess.

There is a mysterious and sort of magical element that I associate with film. Digital offers immediate gratification and confirmation, but film holds a different mystery and element of surprise. My experience as a photographer is very different when I shoot film instead of using my digital equipment.

Susan Goldstein: from Bending Time. Courtesy of the artist. — Susan Goldstein: from *Bending Time.* Courtesy of the artist.

RJ: Concurrent with your landscapes you also make collages which are quite different, very delicate. They’re composed of disparate elements, yet there is obviously a unifying concept behind them. Can you explain what that is?

SG: The one thing that every one of the collages in this body of work has, is something that has to do with making or displaying a photograph. Whether it’s a photograph or slides, the edge of or an entire negative, a metal negative carrier for the enlarger, or a mask to put down on a piece of paper for a contact print, the unifying element is anything that’s related to photographs. It could be the little triangular photo mounts that people used in albums eighty years ago, turned upside down to show where the glue has pulled a bit of the paper off the album page. It can be any little visual element, and as long as there’s something that relates to photography, then I let myself go wherever the image takes me. END

Susan Goldstein, from the COVID-19 Inside Out Series, at Delaware and W 12th St, Denver, in March 2021 during Month of Photography. Courtesy of the artist. — Susan Goldstein, from the *COVID-19 Inside Out Series*, at Delaware and W 12th St, Denver, in March 2021 during Month of Photography. Courtesy of the artist.

Since we finished our interview, Susan has been busy creating images for Denver’s 2021 Month of Photography (MoP). The image above, from the COVID-19 Inside Out Series, is being featured at Delaware and W. 12th St as part of a billboard project sponsored by Save Art Space titled “In A Time of Change.”

She writes that the series “speaks to the universality of the human experience. At the end of the day we all watch the same sun set, we are all vulnerable to the ravages of COVID-19, and each of us has the ability to cooperate for the greater good to help make life easier for all of us.”

Susan Goldstein: Absence of Clarity, from The Ancestor Series. At Museo de las Americas. Courtesy of the artist. — Susan Goldstein: *Absence of Clarity*, from *The Ancestor Series.* At Museo de las Americas. Courtesy of the artist.

Images from The Ancestors Series (above and in gallery below) are being shown at the Museo de las Americas in their MoP show titled “La Nueva Cara/The New Face,” on display March 26 – April 17, 2021. The series draws from Susan’s collection of old hand drawn, painted, and photographic portraits, some of them more than 150 years old, upon which she places three dimensional pieces and then rephotographs the assembly to create an in-camera composite image.

Susan Goldstein: from The Museum Series-9. At Alto Gallery. — Susan Goldstein: from *The Museum Series*-9. At Alto Gallery. Courtesy of the artist.

Yet more of Susan’s new work, titled The Museum Series, is being shown at Alto Gallery’s Denver Collage Club exhibition, March 10-April 22, 2021. As she describes it, The Museum Series photographs (right and below) “are made at various museums around the country. The photographs document evidence of the human hand in the construction of the structures on the museum grounds ... including the museum buildings, parking structures, outdoor related spaces. ... At some point ... I started to see evidence of the humans who were involved in the building of the spaces ... and began to document them.”

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I’ve mentioned before that interviews have been a major part of my research. To that end, last October (2020) I took a deep breath and called one of photography’s most iconic artists, Robert Adams. So many books have been written by and about him that, to be honest, I hadn’t planned to interview him until I discovered his association with Myron Wood, who tutored him informally in the technical aspects of photography when both men lived in Colorado Springs in the early sixties.

Their friendship is the kind of unexpected connection that makes this project so rewarding, and Adams spoke affectionately about Wood: “Some years,” he told me, “we didn't see each other much, but we were good friends. He was a good man, and gifted with a spirit that I hope I have some of myself. As you probably know, he was seriously wounded in the second world war … and I think something out of that kept him free of the pretensions of the art world.”

While they shared interests in historic regions and urban settings, their approaches were very different. Using a medium-format camera, Adams framed his shots with the stark precision of Ingmar Bergman, the Swedish filmmaker whose work he much admires. Wood began his career using a 4x5 but by the time he met Adams he was a committed 35mm photographer, making images shot in a straightforward, publishable, style.

The three pairs of images I’ve chosen for this post illustrate many of their similarities and differences:

Robert Adams: Pikes Peak Park, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1969. © Robert Adams, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco — Robert Adams: *Pikes Peak Park, Colorado Springs, Colorad*o, 1969. © Robert Adams, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Myron Wood: “Stratmoor Hills,” September 1961. Pikes Peak Library District. Myron Wood Collection.

Although Adams is associated with images of urban sprawl, Wood began documenting the encroachment of housing developments in Colorado Springs as early as the 1950s. Adams’s inclusion of a small child on a bicycle in Pikes Peak Park, Colorado Springs, Colorado, 1969 (middle foreground) echoes the child in Wood’s image. However, their emotional tone is quite different. Wood’s humanistic approach emphasizes the bond between child and dog and imbues his image with a spirit of adventure, while the child in Adams’s photograph appears vulnerable and lost in the labyrinth of identical new homes.

Myron Wood, Church near Simla, CO, 1960. Pikes Peak Library District. Myron Wood Collection. 002-1535

Robert Adams, untitled, ca. 1970. (Church near Simla.) History Colorado Collection. 89.93.216-PH BOX 178. © Robert Adams, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco — Robert Adams, untitled, ca. 1970. (Church near Simla.) History Colorado Collection. 89.93.216-PH BOX 178. © Robert Adams, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

The two men took many road trips together, and although they never photographed side by side they did photograph the same structures and places at different times. According to Adams, Wood introduced him to at least two churches to the east of Calhan, east of Colorado Springs on Highway 24. “There were a couple of Russian Orthodox churches,” he recalled, “which I suppose I might've found eventually, but he showed them to me.” The two images of churches near the small town of Simla, also on Highway 24, reveal subtle yet noticeable differences in their approach. Wood emphasizes the landscape while Adams emphasizes the structure. Snow and cloud cover lend Wood’s image a chilly romanticism missing in Adams’ stark image taken under a clear sky in late fall or early spring.

Myron Wood, Burger King, East Colorado Springs, May 1972. Pikes Peak Library District. Myron Wood Collection. 002-775

Robert Adams: Eden, Colorado, 1968. © Robert Adams, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco — Robert Adams: *Eden, Colorado*, 1968. © Robert Adams, courtesy Fraenkel Gallery, San Francisco

Wood was always on the lookout for humor and he often found it in bars and cafes, as in the Burger King photo from 1972. In contrast, Adams was preoccupied with light, which here floods over the counter and illuminates the bouffant hairdo of a customer sitting at the counter. I chose these two images because of their vantage point from behind the customers, but Wood was an affable, outgoing man who most often established a comfortable rapport with his subjects, as in the image below of “Gus Dutch” and his child in a bar.

Myron Wood: Gus Dutch, 1973. Pikes Peak Library District. Myron Wood Collection. 002-1299

The two men often visited and socialised with their wives. As Adams remembers, “We had good times, the four of us, his and his wife (Nancy) and me and Kerstin. One time we went out [to] the El Paso County Fair, which was held in Calhan. I would never have done that myself, but we went out there and it was a fantastic afternoon and just a hometown kind of atmosphere all the way through. And it really opened my eyes to wonderful, light-filled geography as well. The stands were only about six inches high and so you set it off there, just taking it all in.”

For a complete account of Adams’s work look for The Place We Live, a three-volume set published by Yale University Press. An excellent source for more about Wood is Film & Photography on the Front Range, edited by Tim Blevins, Dennis Daily, Sydne Dean, Chris Nicholl, Michael L. Olsen and Katie Rudolph (2012, Pikes Peak Library District).

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