“It Is a Vast Field”: Nancy Newhall and the Call for Research in Photography

In 1945, the American photography curator, critic, and writer Nancy Newhall published a short, yet impassioned piece in the College Art Journal: “The Need for Research in Photography.” Here, she argued, “true critical writing about photography is almost non-existent...yet clarification on the esthetics of photography is urgently needed by everyone.” Newhall had spent the previous years immersed in the nascent formation of a new field of photographic practice, exhibition, and study in the United States as she headed the Museum of Modern Art’s new Department of Photography. There, she championed the expressive potential of photography as a creative medium through her work with artists, her advocacy within the institution, and her ground-breaking exhibitions and collaborative publications with photographers. Among the questions she posed in her work were: what is the most effective form of a photographic museum retrospective? How might the writer, the biographer, the curator, or the editor shape a public’s understanding of an artist’s work, or an artist’s life? What is the relationship between words and images in this endeavor? Newhall’s conscious articulation of these questions—preserved extensively in archives of her letters—joins a handful of others from a period of photography’s first “boom” in the United States. Newhall would go on to write numerous books and essays, contribute extensively to the Photo League, and help found the journal Aperture. Already in this foundational period of the 1940s, her work in photography was formative of what would become, and what Newhall could see was already “a vast field.”