2023 saw the passing of two notable contributors to Colorado’s history of photography. Drex Brooks (1952-2023) documented American massacre sites in a series titled Sweet Medicine, published by UNM Press in 1995. I will be posting an interview with him on the February 2023 blog. Sandy Hume was one of Colorado’s most important photography curators of the 1970s and 80s. Hume (born Richard Paul Hume in 1946) studied photography with Charlie Roitz and Gary Metz at CU Boulder (MFA 1975). His thesis project was a wry documentation of Denver’s National Western Stock Show that was published as Western ..read more

Almost two years ago, I wrote about a 2005 show at Denver’s Gallery Sink titled Early Colorado Contemporary Photography—a remembrance and revival of Winter Prather, Jim Milmoe, Walter Chappell, Arnold Gassan, Syl Labrot, and Nile Root. According to a statement by Root, the six men were all linked in one way or another to the influential photographer/Aperture magazine editor Minor White during the 1950s. To date, I have only written profiles about two of the so-called Minor White Group: Syl Labrot and Jim Milmoe; belatedly, this post begins the process of revisiting the other four photographers ..read more

Kent Gunnufson (b. 1946) is a Granby-based photographer and broadcaster. His “PhotoTalk.TV” website, which began life as a community television program in 1993, is a unique archive of interviews with some of the state’s foremost late-20th century practitioners. In total, Kent estimates that he has over one hundred interviews archived. Among his subjects are John Ward, Hal Gould, Mark Sink, and Al Weber, the founder of the Victor School summer workshop near Colorado Springs. In 1994, Kent became an independent producer for NBC and CBS’s affiliate KCNC-4. His segments promoted local artists and ..read more

Mark Sink and his dog, Utah. Month of Photography installation at RedLine, March 2015. Photo by Rupert Jenkins. This coming March, 2023, RedLine Denver will open “typed live, excuse errors, A Mark Sink Retrospective.” Billed as “the interconnected world of family, community and art,” the show celebrates Mark’s life and contributions to Colorado’s photo community. He is the sole founder of Denver’s Month of Photography and is an original founder of the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver. He also organized The Big Picture street art projects, The Denver Salon, its offshoot The Internet Salon, th ..read more

John Schoenwalter, Aspen, c. .1970s. Photographer unknown. John Schoenwalter’s documentation of counter-cultural activities in Aspen and Denver spans almost a half-century. During his adolescence, Schoenwalter (1942–2019) was a traveler in search of direction. When we met at his studio in 2017, he recounted his childhood in New York City, where he worked in the family paint business “mixing five-gallon buckets of battleship gray … and lugging fifty-pound buckets … of red lead pigment to the mill.”[i] I asked him if his father wanted him to take over the family business. “Oh yes, yes. I gradua ..read more

Peter de Lory: Aspen, CO, 1969. (After Paul Strand. Ellen Manchester and Alex Sweetman in doorway). Like my previous subject, Melanie Walker, I first met Peter de Lory in San Francisco during the late 1980s/early 90s, when he was teaching photography at San Jose State University. I knew him at that time for his narrative-based triptychs, which he describes as “a focal point for all my earlier thoughts and sensibilities” (http://www.peterdelory.com/about-face). Much of those thoughts and sensibilities had coalesced in Colorado during the late sixties/mid seventies, studying photography at Cent ..read more

Baggage, from the Househeads series. This is the second of my two-part interview with Melanie Walker. Melanie teaches in the CU Boulder Media Arts department. When she joined the faculty in 1992 she was known for her use of alternative photographic processes and mixed media, to which she has added large-scale photographic installations, public art, and digital media. This part centers on her Colorado imagemaking and concludes with a discussion of two collaborations: one that incorporates images made by her late-father, Todd Walker, and a second with her partner, the artist/sculptor George Pet ..read more

Last fall I got an unexpected message from Arthur Nager. Art had taught at the Center of the Eye workshop in Aspen in the early seventies, and he wanted to show me an extraordinary set of images he had taken at the Divine Light Festival, a one-day event that took place outside of Montrose in July 1972. The festival was organized to herald the “Perfect Thirteen-Year-Old Master,” aka the Guru Maharaj Ji, now known as Prem Rawat. Something that struck me even before I saw his images was that I, too, may have seen the Guru Maharaj Ji at the Glastonbury Festival in England in 1971. But I might be ..read more

Jim Milmoe, September 2018. Photo by Rupert Jenkins. Last month’s post delved into Jim’s early career as a fine art photographer working in the design and architecture arenas. Here, we conclude the interview with a discussion of his career as an educator, which began in Denver in 1959. In 2017, the organization he helped found—the Colorado Photographic Arts Center—awarded Jim its annual Hal Gould Award in recognition of his significant contributions to the regional photo community. Soon after, his extensive collection of rare photo books was accepted into the University of Denver Special Coll ..read more

James O. Milmoe: 1950s promo image. 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 ..read more