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knowledged for his vitally important role in establishing
the history of photography as a unique and serious fi eld
of study. Through his critical appreciation and rigorous
scholarly inquiry Newhall championed the medium of
photography as an art form in its own right. His overrid-
ing contribution to its study was to interpret photography
from an historical, critical, and aesthetic perspective,
rather than in a strictly technological approach.
Beaumont Newhall’s mother was a semi-professional
photographer. One of his earliest recollections was of
“standing beside my mother in her darkroom while she
developed glass plates by the red glow of the safelight.
I was fascinated to watch the image appear, as if by
magic in the glass tray” (Focus, 10). When he was fi fteen
Newhall taught himself photographic processing, and
making photographs became a lifelong passion.
The summer prior to entering Harvard Newhall fell
under the spell of the movie Variety (1925), directed by
Ewald André Dupont, and photographed by Karl Freund.
Erich Mendelsohn’s Amerika: Bilderbuch eines Archi-
tekten, 1926, depicting skyscrapers, grain elevators and
other industrial buildings was also an early infl uence,
teaching him a new way of looking at photography.
At Harvard he hoped to study fi lm and photography,
but as there were no courses offered in these subjects,
he studied art history. His professors included Adolph
Goldschmidt and Paul Sachs. In 1934 he presented his
fi rst paper, “Photography and Painting,” on the history
of photography, at the College Art Association.
In 1936 while working as the librarian at Museum of
Modern Art (MOMA) in New York, Newhall, curated
the museum’s fi rst exhibition of photographs at the
request of Director Alfred Barr. Conceived of as an
overview of the history of the art form, Photography
1839–1937 contained a combination of historical and
contemporary photographs. Its real impact however,
lay in the display of the little-known nineteeth century
works. Furthermore, in eschewing the then popular
“pictorial” school of photography in favor of exhibiting
only “pure” or “straight” [straightforward] photography,
Newhall propounded a new photographic aesthetic. In
the exhibition catalog Newhall also introduced formal
criteria for judging photography as a fi ne art. The catalog
was revised as Photography: A Short Critical History
(1938), which in turn formed the basis for his History
of Photography from 1839 to the Present Day (1949).
Revised fi ve times and translated into several languages,
History of Photography, has been recognized as a semi-
nal work in the history of photography and continues to
be a widely read textbook.
After this fi rst exhibition, Newhall’s passion for
photography became his vocation. In 1940 MOMA
formed its Department of Photography with Newhall
as its curator.
He remained at MOMA until 1947, although his
wife Nancy Newhall (1908–1974, see summary below)
served as Acting Curator from 1942–1945, while he was
stationed overseas, during which time she curated fi fteen
exhibitions for the museum. Other seminal exhibitions
curated by Newhall include the photography section of
“Art of Our Time” (1939); “Photographs of the Civil
War and the American Frontier” (1942); and the Edward
Weston Retrospective (1946).
In 1948 Newhall became the fi rst curator of photogra-
phy at the George Eastman House and began developing
his second major photography collection for an institu-
tion. Nancy Newhall arranged the Eastman House’s
permanent photography exhibition. In the late 1960s
Beaumont and Nancy assembled a collection of photo-
graphs for the Exchange National Bank of Chicago, an
early example of corporate collecting.
When Newhall arrived at Eastman House he had
already spent a summer teaching at Black Mountain
College. Throughout his tenure at Eastman House
he continued to teach at a variety of institutions. He
and James Card developed the fi rst courses given for
academic credit in the histories of motion pictures and
photography at the Rochester Institute of Technology
and the University of Rochester. Newhall was known for
the quality of his teaching—stressing original thought
and research, and the exploration of new subjects in
order to expand the history of photography. Many of
Newhall’s students became curators or professors at
major institutions.
Nancy and Beaumont Newhall counted many con-
temporary photographers among their close friends,
most notably Edward Weston, Alfred Stieglitz, Minor
White, Paul Strand, and Ansel Adams with whom Nancy
collaborated on numerous projects. Nancy Newhall’s
concentration on working with practicing photographers
was no doubt due to her own training as a painter and
artist. In addition to her more than two decades of work
with Ansel Adams, Nancy Newhall wrote and worked
with Paul Strand and Edward Weston, whose day books
she edited (1961–66). Whereas posthumous evaluations
of an artist’s life and work had been the norm for art
history monographs, Nancy Newhall’s scholarly work
on living photographers set a precedent for serious
publications about contemporary artists. The books
that she collaborated on with Ansel Adams helped for-
mulate another new genre of pictorial essay—scholarly
nature photography books, as epitomized by This is the
American Earth (1960).
Although Newhall revised and updated his extremely
infl uential core study History of Photography fi ve times,
the book has not been without its detractors, especially
in the late twentieth century when the methodology
of art history and the discipline’s assumptions came
under close scrutiny. Newhall’s methodology has some-
times been seen as old-school formalism. Yet, as Carl