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The One Who Saw
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11133 |
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Section : |
BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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10 / 1993 |
2,031 Words |
| Author
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Judith Bell
Judith Bell is an art historian and novelist based in
Arlington, Virginia. |
FOCUS
Memoirs of a Life in Photography
Beaumont Newhall
Boston: Bulfinch Press/Little, Brown and Company, 1993
264 pp., $35.00
This past February, photography lost another of its giants with the passage of Beaumont Newhall. At the age of twenty-nine he curated the first major photography exhibition in this country, Photography 1839-1937, at the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) and wrote The History of Photography, recognized as the definitive text on the subject. He went on to become the director of MOMA's photography department when it was established in 1940. Beginning in 1948, Newhall was curator of George Eastman House for ten years, then served as director for another thirteen. From 1972 until his death, he was professor of art at the University of New Mexico while continuing to write from his home in Santa Fe and to lecture.
I first made Newhall's acquaintance in 1980 when I worked for photography dealer Harry Lunn. A few years later, as a project director at SITES (Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service), I organized a retrospective of his photographs that toured nationally in conjunction with the publication of In Plain Sight: The Photographs of Beaumont Newhall (Peregrine Smith, 1983). For the last several years Newhall was at work on his memoirs. Whenever I visited him I would find him ready to explore the past he was steadily recording.
One of the art world's best and most charming storytellers, he made history come alive like no one else. Ansel Adams, Alfred Stieglitz, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Margaret Bourke-White, they all came back in stories that were never about Newhall himself so much as they were about his subjects. He was always the finely tuned observer, the one who saw, the one who would remember.
In Focus: Memoirs of a Life in Photography, I found many of the stories I had heard firsthand. Reading them I could hear his voice, catch the twinkle in his eye. The people he writes about were his friends, his colleagues. He has with this book done two difficult things: In revealing telling details and minor foibles, he has made the people who shaped his life as real for us as they were for him, and he has skillfully avoided the inevitable bareness brought on by a bloated array of meaningless facts so familiar to other autobiographies.
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