Robert Adams and Myron Wood

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

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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.

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

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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.

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

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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. 

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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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Thanks for reading!

Ellen Manchester and the "Rephotographic Survey Project"

Photo historian Ellen Manchester is associated with practically every significant landscape project made in Colorado during the 1970s and 80s. Foremost among them are The Great West exhibition and book (CU Boulder, 1977, with Sandy Hume and Gary Metz) and the Rephotographic Survey Project (RSP), which compared 19th century survey images with contemporary photographs taken from exactly the same vantage point a century later. 

I first met Ellen in the 1990s in San Francisco, when I was Associate Director of SF Camerawork and her husband, Robert Dawson, served on the board of directors. Her connection to Colorado photography is one of those unexpected convergences that have marked so much of my research. 

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Ellen Manchester, Project Director, The Rephotographic Survey Project, Colorado Mountain College, Breckenridge, CO. ca. 1978. Courtesy of Ellen Manchester.

She began work on what became RSP soon after she was hired to direct the photography program at Colorado Mountain College, Breckenridge (CMC) in 1976. Her concept for the project was inspired by seeing the Mountain of the Holy Cross and recalling William Henry Jackson’s 1873 photograph of it. She shared her thoughts with Mark Klett, then a student at the Visual Studies Workshop in Rochester, and they decided to develop the idea of rephotographing sites to gauge land use over the previous century.

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Kenda North: Rephotographic Survey Field Trip (Mark Klett, center; Ellen Manchester far left). Courtesy of Kenda North.

A grant from the NEA the following year enabled Klett and JoAnn Verburg to join her in Breckenridge to teach classes and begin fieldwork. The first year’s work was limited to Colorado and produced a manageable grouping of twenty-seven “rephotographs” of Jackson prints from the 1870s.

After the first year, Verburg left to coordinate Polaroid’s program for artists using their giant 20 x 24 camera. Rick Dingus and Gordon Bushaw joined the team, and the two plus Klett worked individually in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Wyoming, rephotographing an expanded pool of source photographers that now included Alexander Gardner, John Hillers, A. J. Russell, and most importantly Timothy O’Sullivan, whose objectivity and immaculate composition had earned him an iconic status within the New Topographics community.

In 1979 (the third and last year of photography) Manchester left CMC to direct photo workshops at the Sun Valley Center for the Arts and Humanities. In what was “a difficult separation from Colorado Mountain College” Manchester took the project (and Klett) with her. Bushaw joined them in Idaho and was tasked with rephotographing O’Sullivan imagery from the Great Basin regions of Nevada, Utah, and California. Dingus continued a side project at the Zuni Pueblo in Arizona. (He returned to the region in the eighties to document Indigenous rock art for Marks in Place, a project organized by CU Boulder’s Charlie Roitz.)

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Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project book cover. Photographs: Left, Andrew J. Russell, 1968. Hanging Rock, foot of Echo Canon. (Western Americana Collection. Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.) Right, Rick Dingus for the Rephotographic Survey Project, 1978. Hanging Rock, foot of Echo Canyon, Utah. Published by the University of New Mexico Press, 1984.

In total, RSP’s team had meticulously rephotographed 122 photographs had been throughout the Southwest in color and black-and-white. A catalog/report titled “Second View: The Rephotographic Survey Project” was published in 1984 (University of New Mexico Press). Merry A. Foresta links the impact of RSP with that of New Topographics. Ultimately, she writes, the two projects “proposed aesthetic revelations that could sometimes reach beyond themselves towards areas of moral concern. The ordinary, simple act of describing the landscape suddenly became loaded with responsibility. These developments … completely altered contemporary notions about photography.”[i]

The Rephotographic Survey team near Mountain of the Holy Cross, Colorado. 1979/80? L-R: Michael Keyes, Ellen Manchester, Mark Klett, Richard Neill, JoAnn Verburg, (? filmmaker), Chris Felver.

In the wake of its publication, many like-minded projects have appeared. In Colorado, John Fielder published several successful books using William Henry Jackson as his source imagery, and Grant Collier rephotographed late-19th century photographs of Colorado made by his great-great grandson Joseph Collier. Most recently, historic images of downtown Pueblo have been rephotographed by John Wark.

In 1996, Klett initiated Third View, a rephotographic project that revisited many of RSP’s original sites. Surprisingly given the accelerating pace of society, the new work revealed little change in the twenty years between projects. Third View’s team supplemented their cameras (now digital) with computers, CD-ROMS, an internet blog, and the gathering of artifacts found in the field. In doing so a new multi-media approach to field work was introduced.[ii]

Please feel free to email me, leave a comment, and “Subscribe” to receive notices of new posts. Visit “ColoradoPhotoHistory” on Instagram and Facebook to see more images. The next post narrates the story of Colorado Springs photographer Myron Wood, whose achievements include a book of portraits of Georgia O’Keeffe at Abiquiu, NM, and an intimate document of the southern Colorado Catholic sect known as the Penitentes.

[i] Foresta, Between Home and Heaven. 44.

[ii] Third View is available as a book and CD-ROM (Mark Klett, Kyle Bajakian, William L. Fox, Michael Marshall, Toshi Ueshina, and Byron Wolfe, Third Views, Second Sights: A Rephotographic Survey of the American West (Albuquerque: Museum of New Mexico Press in association with the Center of American Places, 2004); and as a website: accessed November 2020,  http://www.thirdview.org/3v/home/index.html.