Jim Milmoe’s professional career in photography began in the early 1950s, when he moved permanently to Colorado from Pittsburgh. He was born in 1927, on the cusp of the first Great Depression; now an elegant, silver-haired man known for his eclectic taste in bolo ties, he speaks of three milestone accomplishments: Ansel Adams citing his technical book “Guide to Good Exposure” as “the best instruction book for any exposure meter I have ever seen” in 1970 [1]; breaking what he terms the Denver Art Museum’s “photo bar” when one of his black-and-white abstract images was accepted into a juried exhibition there in 1972; and receiving a Governor’s Award in 1973 “for his dedicated efforts in advancing the Arts and Humanities in the State of Colorado.”
His most prestigious exhibition took place in 1989, when his old nemesis the Denver Art Museum presented Shadows of Life: James Milmoe Photographs, a collection of over sixty images depicting graveyards found throughout Colorado and the world. (Milmoe has photographed more than 300 grave markers for what has become a career-long, still ongoing project.) After the show, exhibition curator Dianne Vanderlip wrote to him that it was “one of the most important bodies of work ever produced by a Colorado photographer.”
Jim’s energy and enthusiasm for his craft are infectious. We met several times between 2017 and 2019 before Covid quarantined him in his mid-century-modern home in Golden, Colorado. This interview has been transcribed with Jim’s help from those conversations.
RJ: Jim, you’ve lived in Colorado for practically the entire fifty-year span of my project. I think you arrived in 1953?
JM: Actually, I came out first to study at Colorado College in 1945 and graduated with a degree in chemistry in 1949. I got hooked on Colorado and came back in 1953. When I got out of school I got an early Leica as a present and I got a ’49 Ford convertible and took off for about three months; drove all through the west and up into Canada, photographing. I went back to Pittsburgh and got a job at the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, then they moved me up to a lab in Ohio, in the Akron area. I was there a couple of years and then they wanted to transfer me to Alabama and I said, “Been there done that, I’m not going back,” so I quit.
When I got back to Pittsburgh a photographer said, “your work looks good, why don’t you come to one of our meetings of the Natural Color Camera Club,” one of the biggest color photo clubs in the country. He said to bring along a couple of pictures and they won first, second and third prize, so I thought there may be something to my talent here!
After I got back to Pittsburgh, Marilynn and I got married. We had dated in high school—brilliant woman. We immediately decided to leave and moved to Colorado. We just put our artwork in the convertible and drove out. I think we had one set of dishes, and no pots and pans. Marilynn got a job as director of publicity for Colorado Women’s College and I got a job in Golden with the Colorado School of Mines Research Foundation. That was a total nightmare because I was working with uranium and the dust was so thick you couldn’t see across the lab.
I had clearance from the Department of Defense, and I did a project on the effect of heat on military explosives. That was in 1957. After seven years of working with toxic and explosive products I left the Foundation. In 1959 I started teaching non-credit photography. I’d been shooting since I was a little kid, and all through high school and college, and I photographed for architects and artists in Ohio and shot brochures and reports for the Foundation. I used Otto Roach’s darkroom [in Denver] for a while. He was a good guy. He was doing commercial work and he let me use his darkroom.
Eventually, CU Denver saw my work and asked me if I’d teach creative photography in what they called Continuing University Studies at the University of Colorado at Denver. I taught it twice a year from 1959 to 1985.
RJ: We’ve talked a lot about the group associated with Minor White that you were a part of in the 1950s. How did you all meet?
JM: John Krimmel was a member of the William H. Jackson Camera Club and a scientist at the DU research foundation, where Winter [Prather] had been working. [2] When John saw my cemetery pictures [above] he said, “You’ve got to meet Winter Prather—he’s the only person I’ve known who’s shot cemeteries aside from you.” So I met him and would invite Winter over to talk photography. He knew Walt [Chappell] and Walter was starting to do some pretty creative stuff. Nile Root had a little shop on Colfax and that’s where Walter learned photography, from Nile. He had a darkroom Walter could use. So that’s how we all got together.
RJ: Can you tell me a bit more about Winter?
JM: Winter was a fascinating guy, I really enjoyed him. He was doing some commercial work here in Denver and one day he had a shoot scheduled with Coors and it was all set up. He was supposed to come by at 10 am to shoot and no Winter. … Well, needless to say, that was the end of Winter and Coors. So I started working with Coors and I shot for them and did a book.
RJ: Was Winter mad at you for taking his job?
JM: No, no, no, we were good friends, he didn’t care, he didn’t want to do it. [After that] he went to New York and shot for one of the airlines and others, and got in trouble with those guys. He turned them all off and came back to Denver. He was destitute, he had no place to live; he was broke, and he was starting to lose it. I arranged for him to stay with my cousin and after a few months he left, and then it just went totally downhill. I went down to see him in Taos and he was teleporting cats through the wall in [his mother’s] house—that was pretty far out.
RJ: I know you didn’t go to the 1951 photo conference in Aspen, but I think you got a lot of work from the design conferences? [3]
JM: I photographed all 49 of the conferences. I was on the program one year when George Nelson was the chairman. I had a slide show and two one-man shows up there in the tent. That made my year because I got to meet important people—George Nelson, Milton Glaser, Massimo Vignelli, etc. You could sit down and talk with them. In New York you could never get in to see them because of the secretaries and things, but I got to know them by going back [to Aspen] year after year—we established relationships and I got work from them.
RJ: When did you start in business as a photographer?
JM: 1961.
RJ: Two years later you were one of the founders of the Colorado Photographic Arts Center.
JM: Yeah, we started that as an adjunct to the Colorado Council of Camera Clubs. We got together and decided to start the center because Otto Bach was the director of the Denver Art Museum and he had a total blockage for photography as an art. They had an annual art competition—“The Metropolitan Annual”—and I would take my photos down to be judged—they had national judges—and Otto would meet me at the door and he would say “Jim, you know photography is not an art, we can’t accept that,” and he wouldn’t even look at it.
That went on for a couple of years, then they had James Johnson Sweeney, director of the Houston Museum, as the judge and he didn’t know photography wasn’t an art. Otto was out of town and I just walked in and slipped my entry behind a painting. It got judged and he put it in. First show [at DAM] to hang a photograph on the wall as a piece of fine art. Bach’s attitude was so bad you can hardly believe it.
James O. Milmoe: Chicago L, nd.
James O. Milmoe: Polaroid image taken at the 1963 Minor White workshop.
RJ: In 1963 you attended the first Denver workshop by Minor White, which was organized by Arnold Gassan. How was that for you?
JM: I didn’t realize until a few years ago, when Gassan did a little pamphlet, that I’d gotten into Zen through Minor. Because I’d gotten into looking at a thing, seeing it with total concentration, and relating to it visually and sympathetically, empathetically. That was all Minor’s teaching, and when we were through, I could concentrate so strongly.
RJ: Someone else associated with that “Minor White Group” was Syl Labrot, who many people have said was a visionary color technician.
JM: He was a neat guy. Before he left Denver [in 1958] he was starting to do dye transfers, one of the only ones in the state. I don’t know where I met Syl but he was just starting out in commercial photography and he was doing postcards—little red barn and mountains in the background, snow, good but very commercial—and I said, “Syl, you’ve got to come down and meet these guys, we’re doing interesting work and you should see it.” So he came down and he did a 360! And that’s what started him on really creative stuff and he just took it and ran. And then he went back east and later did Pleasure Beach; he oversaw the printing and that whole thing. It was just an awesome book. That was his major project, a beautiful book.
End of Part One. Part Two of this interview will concentrate on Jim’s career as an educator.
Jim Milmoe at home, Golden, CO, January 23, 2017. Photograph by Rupert Jenkins.
[1] Ansel Adams, Camera and Lens: The Creative Approach (Hastings-on-Hudson, NY: Morgan & Morgan, Inc., 1970), 74. Milmoe also recounts that Adams nominated him to be a Fellow member of ASMP, elevating him from Associate.
[2] The University of Denver Research Foundation assigned Prather to photograph explosive tests in Utah in 1951, part of the government’s nuclear research program (see chapter xx).
[3] The “Aspen Golden Days” photography conference took place in 1951 and was subsequently folded into the Aspen design conferences. For more on this, see blog posts March 31, 2021, and April 16, 2021.
All images courtesy of James O. Milmoe unless otherwise noted.
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.
#coloradophotohistory @coloradophotohistory #outsideinfluence #jimmilmoe #jamesomilmoe #minorwhite #winterprather #syllabrot
