Nancy Newhall

Writer and photographer, born in Swampscott, Massachusetts, USA. An art student who married Beaumont Newhall, she was curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art (1942–5), writing books with Ansel Adams and Edward Weston.

Nancy Wynne Newhall (May 9, 1908–July 7, 1974) was an American photography critic. She is best known for writing the text to accompany photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, but was also a widely published writer on photography, conservation, and American culture. She married Beaumont Newhall, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and substituted for him in that role during his military service in World War II. During the 1940s she wrote essays on popular art and culture for small magazines and journals, in which she called for a society more attuned to art, and particularly to visual art. in a 1940 essay, she explores the possibilities of the new medium of television for popularizing the visual arts, suggesting techniques for teaching art and photography on camera:

. ("Television" 38)

In another, she argues for the centrality of photography for understanding and teaching American history ("Research").

In 1945, Newhall wrote the text for a book of photographs, Time in New England, by Paul Strand. The work would begin a new phase for her career, in which she became a vocal proponent and a central pioneer of the genre of oversized photography collections. The best known and most influential of these is This Is the American Earth, a collaboration with Ansel Adams, published in 1960. Like Adams, Newhall was involved with the Sierra Club, and wrote often about issues of conservation. She was sometimes accused of political heavi-handedness on that subject—one uncharitable review of American Earth calls her prose "so full of Message that there is no room for poetry" (Deevey)—but her explication of the political context and motivation of Adams's work has been important for the Sierra Club and the conservation movement in general. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1945. Time in New England: Photographs by Paul Strand. New York: Aperture, 1950. Reprinted New York: Harper and Row, 1980. Rockefeller, Jr. New York: Knopf, 1957. (with Beaumont Newhall) Masters of Photography. New York: Braziller, 1958. Reprinted (with photographs) as Ansel Adams: The Eloquent Light. New York: Aperture, 1980. (with Ansel Adams)Fiat Lux: The University of California. New York: McGraw Hill, 1967.