What's It All About?

Welcome back to Outside Influence, a blog that traces the post-WWII history of creative photography in Colorado. Before we go any further, I thought I’d answer a few questions that have come up. 

This blog is based on three-plus years and counting of research into what I think of as a foundational period leading to today’s “contemporary” practice. By creative I mean expressive, experimental, fine art, non-commercial photography - artwork that does on occasion include assignment projects but excludes out-and-out commercial practice: fashion, for example.

I’m hoping this will culminate in a book , which I am calling Outside Influence. My target publication date is mid-2022. I should stress that while my research is thoroughly referenced it is not an academic thesis, nor is it a critique. Rather, it is an accessible biographical narrative written with a general audience in mind, yet will also serve as a resource suitable for post-graduate students. 

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David Hiser: Cherie Hiser and Dale Raisig in front of Center of the Eye office, Aspen, 1970. Courtesy of David Hiser.

The title Outside Influence has a double intent: to suggest regional influences coming into the state, and to acknowledge Colorado photography’s historic association with the landscape. “Colorado photography” is often interpreted to mean scenic nature studies, but my intention is to survey anything and anybody who has made significant contributions to the creative end of the spectrum.

Why 1945–95? Pre-WWII photography in Colorado is well known, and its post-1995 digital era is relatively accessible and easily researched. There is a void when it comes to the mid–late 20th century period of photographic innovation, however, and I fear the history of its practice and practitioners may well disappear unless it is recorded soon. 

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Myron Wood: Sheep, Storm, South Park, 1967. Pikes Peak Library District. Myron Wood Collection. 002-1269.

If you have resources to lend or knowledge and ideas to share, please let me know via the comments section. Please Subscribe, and visit “ColoradoPhotoHistory” on Instagram to view more images from the project. 

The next post narrates the activities of Ellen Manchester (below) and the Rephotographic Survey Project based at Colorado Mountain College in Breckenridge during the seventies.

Thanks for reading!

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Peter de Lory: Ellen Manchester, Colorado, ca. 1970s. Courtesy of Peter de Lory.

Myron Wood: “The best kept secret in America”

The Colorado Springs photographer, Myron Wood, settled on a career in photography after viewing an Edward Weston retrospective at MoMA in 1946. During his fifty-year residency in the Springs (1947–1999) Wood arguably created the most extensive chronicle of Southwest people and places ever assembled, and along the way tutored Robert Adams in the fundamentals of photography.

Because shows I’d seen at Camera Obscura and elsewhere tended to emphasize clouds and open space I had thought of Wood primarily as a scenic landscape photographer. How wrong I was! His environmental portraits are especially strong, particularly those he made of Los Hermanos de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno, a guarded Catholic sect known for their practice of extreme atonement. His book “Colorado: Big Mountain Country” (1969, with Nancy Wood), includes several Penitente images as well as superb landscapes, architectural studies, and quirky portraits of people in urban settings.

Wood moved to Colorado Springs in 1947. Early in his career he had to rely on playing piano in bars to supplement his income, but in 1951 he secured a position as photographer for the Taylor Museum at FAC (1951–61, later Assistant Curator), and in 1958 as official photographer for Colorado College (CC) until he retired in 1988. Grants from the Ford Foundation Education Project (1959–61) and Bonfils Foundation (1963) enabled him to travel widely throughout Colorado and northern New Mexico, during which time he continued his extensive documentation of a Catholic sect known as Pentitente Brotherhood—a series that was first shown at the Taylor Museum in 1955.

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Abrams, 1995

During an interview with the Pikes Peak Library in 1987, he ruefully considered himself to be “the best kept secret in America.” An extended photo essay of Georgia O’Keeffe published in 1995 by Abrams as O’Keeffe at Abiquiu did bring him some lasting international attention, but its publication was delayed and arrived on the cusp of a long decline in his health. 

Wood died in Colorado Springs after a long illness in 1999. Presciently, he had sold his personal archive of 150,000 cataloged prints, negatives, and papers some years earlier to the Pikes Peak Library District, where it is accessible to the public.

Today, he is principally remembered for his O’Keeffe portfolio, his documentation of the penitentes, and for his fine art landscapes made in the tradition of his friend Laura Gilpin. In his oral history published in Photography on the Front Range, Wood reflected that he was the “the best kept secret in America.” When I spoke to his daughter Margaret in 2018, she perhaps identifies why when she says, “he wasn’t a landscape photographer, or a portrait photographer, or a cityscape, building photographer; he was everything.”

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Myron Wood: Los Hermanos de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno, 1976. Pikes Peak Library District. Myron Wood Collection. 47617-31.

An interview with Wood (extracted below) and an essay about his career appears in Film and Photography on the Front Range, an invaluable regional book published by Pikes Peak Library District, edited by Tim Blevins, Dennis Daily, Sydne Dean, Chris Nicholl, Michael L. Olsen & Katie Rudolph.

[About Los Hermanos de Nuestro Padre Jesus Nazareno, above] “This is a brotherhood. This is the first photograph in the history of photography of these men, with their permission, in their little meeting house. This is their chapel behind them. They believe in extreme penance. They are very secretive, but by working for years with the Pueblo Library, I was able to get acquainted with them and gain their trust and be allowed to photograph within their own building, with their permission.” From Myron Wood interview in Film and Photography on the Front Range. © 2012 Pikes Peak Library District.

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Myron Wood: Rear, homemade truck. East of Pueblo, CO, 1977. Pikes Peak Library District. Myron Wood Collection. 3777-14.

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Myron Wood: Penitente family, nd. Pikes Peak Library District. Myron Wood Collection. 4774-20.

“I suppose if you get this far, you have the right to give a little advise. I’ve had six children, I love them dearly; I’ve never mothered them in a smothering way. They’ve always known that I’ve loved them, never doubted that and they can come to me whenever they like. I seldom say, “I think you ought to such and such.” I was talking with a dear friend of mine once who—she also had four or five children, but our attitudes were different—I said I thought that when a youngster was twenty-odd it was time to give them their own room. She said, ‘But Myron, they don’t know what to do.’ But by twenty or twenty-one they need to learn—hard way, easy way—that’s best.” From Myron Wood interview in Film and Photography on the Front Range. © 2012 Pikes Peak Library District.

In 2000, the year after his death, Wood was included in the Colorado Masters of Photography exhibition at the Denver Art Museum, showing alongside Ferenc Berko, Hal Gould, and Mary Alice Johnston (the show was curated by Jane Fudge and was reviewed by Michael Paglia for Westword). Sadly, although he and Nancy collaborated on six books together, no career retrospective of his work has been published to date.

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