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Walter Chappell (1925 – 2000)
Vintage 1961 Gelatin Silver Print
Untitled (nude and rock)
Signed by artist in ink and dated 1961 in pencil en verso
7 3/8 x 9 5/8 inches.
Walter Chappell (1925 – 2000), whose finely detailed, impeccably printed photographs of landscapes, natural forms and the human body were known for their mystical intensity, died on Tuesday in Santa Fe. He was 75 and lived in El Rito in northern New Mexico.
The cause was complications from lung cancer and a lung infection, said his companion, Linda Elvira Piedra.
Although his work is represented in museums across the country, Mr. Chappell was not widely known outside the world of art photography. Within the field he was a constant if peripatetic presence for more than 40 years. From 1957 to 1961 he was curator of prints and exhibitions at George Eastman House in Rochester and was affiliated with Aperture, the photography magazine (and now book publisher) founded by the photographer Minor White in 1952.
In the early 1960’s he was the driving force behind the Association of Heliographers Archive Gallery, a photographers cooperative and gallery on Lexington Avenue whose members included Paul Caponigro, Marie Cosindas and Nicholas Dean. He published several books of photographs and wrote widely on the subject, promulgating ideas influenced by the writings of G. I. Gurdjieff.
A student of White and Edward Weston, Mr. Chappell worked in a tradition founded by Alfred Stieglitz that viewed photography as the means to a deeper reality and therefore the certain equal of painting, poetry and music. It revered precise darkroom technique as crucial in communicating this reality to the viewer. His richly toned black-and-white images exuded an almost tantric air of concentration and often considerable sexual charge. An exhibition of vintage photographs from 1954 to 1978 at the Roth Horowitz Gallery in Manhattan in March, his first show in New York in nearly 20 years, included images of desert rocks cast in dark shadow and a large fern curling across the torso of a pregnant woman, and most startling, a close-up of a woman’s vulva just after childbirth.
With photography as the anchor of his life, and trained in several other arts and crafts as well, Mr. Chappell was a free spirit. He moved dozens of times, built 25 darkrooms and at least three houses for himself; painted, played the piano and wrote poetry throughout his life and also made films. Beginning in the early 1960’s, he was also a nudist, weather and social conditions permitting. He supported himself as an oyster fisherman, carpenter and house builder and as a photographer of celebrities. (His subjects included Nico, Sharon Tate and Dennis Hopper.) In two marriages and several long-term relationships he had seven children.
He was born in Portland in 1925, the son of a contralto who sang with the Portland Symphony Choir and a train engineer who was one-quarter American Indian. He lived his first three years on the Yumatillo Indian Reservation in northeast Oregon, which left him permanently enthralled with American Indian ceremonies. After the family moved to Portland, he studied music at a conservatory at age 6, then attended the Benson Polytechnical School, majoring in architectural drawing. He met White, who became a lifelong friend and mentor, when he was 17.
After being a paratrooper in World War II, Mr. Chappell made San Francisco his base for several years, joining a circle of photographers that included White, Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Ansel Adams. In the mid-1950’s he was found to have tuberculosis and spent three years in a sanitarium in Denver. While recuperating he studied with the photographer Winter Prather, a master technician who made his own lenses and cameras.
Once recovered, Mr. Chappell moved to Rochester, N.Y., where he resumed studying printmaking with White, who was working at Eastman House, and began working there himself. In 1957 he had his first New York exhibition at George Wittenborn Inc.
After leaving Eastman House in 1961, Mr. Chappell settled in Wingdale, N.Y., where a fire destroyed his house and nearly all his work that year. In 1963, after a second house he built on the same property was taken for a power line, he relocated to the Pacific Coast, living in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Hawaii and Big Sur and exhibiting his work in local galleries at nearly every stop. He lived in or near Santa Fe from 1965 to 1970 and returned to the area in 1979. In 1987 he settled in El Rito in a house that he mostly built himself on an existing foundation.
Mr. Chappell’s first wife, Patricia Schmid, whom he married in 1956, died in 1959. He was married to his second wife, Suzanne Lechau, from 1977 to 1984. In addition to Ms. Piedra, he is survived by his son, Dharma, of Bend, Ore., whose mother is Leslie Spears; the four sons that he had with Nancy Barrett Dickinson, Theo, of Ukiah, Calif., Aryan, of Redwood Valley, Calif., Piki, of San Francisco, and Robin, of Eugene, Ore.; a daughter, Riversong, of Spokane, Wash., whose mother is Ms. Lechau; and a stepdaughter, Ajna Lechau, of New York City.
Born in 1925 in Portland, Oregon, Walter Chappell studied architectural drawing at Benson Polytechnical School and piano and musical composition at Ellison-White conservatory of Music.
From 1943-46, he served in the U.S. 13 th Airborne Division.
Chappell’s friendship with Minor White, which began in 1942, was renewed in San Francisco in 1947, and although his creative interests would later turn to photography, his main pursuits then were music, painting, and writing.
Logue and Glyphs, a book of his poetry, was published in 1948. In 1952, he attended the Frank Lloyd Wright Taliesin Fellowship in Arizona.
In 1957, Chappell settled in Rochester, New York, to study photographic printmaking technique with Minor White. Here he wrote and edited for Aperture magazine and assisted White in early intensive workshops.
Gestures of Infinity, a collection of images and poetry was produced in 1957.
In 1960, Under The Sun, images by Walter Chappell, Nathan Lyons, and Syl Labrot, was published by George Braziller.
Chappell founded the Association of Heliographers Gallery Archive in New York and directed it’s activities until 1965.
Heliographers (Founding Members):
Paul Caponigro
Walter Chappell
Carl Chiarenza
William Clift
Marie Cosindas
Nicholas Dean
Paul Petricone
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Following a relocation to Big Sur, California, where he was commissioned by MGM to photograph Sharon Tate (see featured article in “W” Magazine August 2001), Elizabeth Taylor, and Richard Burton, his growing interest in the imagery of the human form in nature and experimental film-making instigated a move to Taos, New Mexico, to photograph the nude and landscape and to study Native American ceremonial life.
After still another move to San Francisco where he lived from 1968-74, he began experimental work with electron photography: high voltage/high frequency electron imagery of living plants. This work was presented in his Metaflora Portfolio in 1980.
In 1977 Chappell was awarded a National Endowment for the Arts Photographer’s Fellowship. From 1977-79, he lived in Hilo, Hawaii, accepting an Artist in Residence position at the Volcano Arts Center. In 1980, he returned to New Mexico, was awarded his second Photographer’s Fellowship and ninety print retrospective exhibition appeared at the Colorado Photographic Arts Center in Denver.
His Solar Incarnate Portfolio was introduced in 1981.
His third National Endowment for the Arts Photographer’s Fellowship was granted in 1984.
In 1987, Chappell moved to the remote village of El Rito, New Mexico and from there continued to exhibit, lecture, give workshops and make fieldtrips.
In 1989, he was invited by the Polaroid Corporation to work on their large format 20″x24″ camera in New York where he produced his Immediate Mythology Collaboration.
His final concern was the preparation of a retrospective monograph on his work in photography, entitled Collected Light. It was in progress at the time of his death in August 2000.
Walter Landon Chappell (June 8, 1925 — August 8, 2000) was an American photographer and poet who forged his career in black and white photography in a unique journey that aligned his understanding of a deeper reality with a deliberate and precise photographic technique culminating in what he called camera vision.
Though not widely known outside of the field of photography, Chappell was a constant presence in black and white imagery among other noted photographers Minor White, Alfred Stieglitz, and Edward Weston, with whom he studied. Chappell was curator of prints and exhibitions at the George Eastman House in Rochester from 1957 to 1961 and was affiliated with Aperture magazine founded by Minor White in 1952.
Chappell left the George Eastman House in 1961, to settle in Wingdale, New York with noted painter and artist, Nancy Chappell (then Nancy Barrett Dickinson). Soon after building their home, a fire destroyed their house and nearly all of Chappell’s photographic work to date, including photographic negatives and their corresponding prints.
Chappell re-located to San Francisco where he became re-acquainted with Minor White and joined a circle of photographers that included Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Ansel Adams. After recuperating from tuberculosis in Denver, Colorado, he studied with the photographer Winter Prather, a master technician.
Walter Chappell traveled extensively during his career. Following a relocation to Big Sur, California, where he was commissioned by MGM to photograph Sharon Tate (see featured article in “W” Magazine, August 2001), Elizabeth Taylor, and Richard Burton, his growing interest in the imagery of the human form in nature and experimental filmmaking instigated a move to Taos, New Mexico, to photograph the human form and the expansive landscape of the Southwest. He continued to study Native American ceremonial life and became intimately connected with the Taos Pueblo.
After still another move to San Francisco where he lived from 1970–74, he began experimental work with electron photography: high voltage/high frequency electron imagery of living plants. This work was presented in his Metaflora Portfolio in 1980. Chappell continued his photographic exploration of electron photography in Hilo, Hawaii in 1984 after being awarded the National Endowment for the Arts Photographer’s Fellowship for the third time. Chappell moved to his final residence in the remote village of El Rito, New Mexico in 1987 and from there continued to exhibit, lecture, give workshops and make field trips.
Chappell has a significant representation of works in collections at: the Museum of Modern Art (New York, New York); the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House (Rochester, New York); Library of Congress (Washington, D.C.); Museum of Art, Stanford University (Palo Alto, California); Metro Goldwyn Mayer Studio (Culver City, California) among many others.
Obituaries
August 14, 2000
Walter Chappell, 75, a maverick and pioneer in the world of art photography who focused his attention–and his camera–on the wonders of plant life, natural forms and the human body. Born in Portland, Ore., Chappell led something of a nomadic life, moving more than 10 times, building 25 darkrooms and three homes along the way. After serving as a paratrooper in the Army during World War II, Chappell landed in San Francisco where he became associated with some of the great photographers of the day including Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and Edward Weston. In the mid-1950s, he followed photographer Minor White to the Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y., where he studied printmaking with White and eventually became the center’s curator of prints after White left to pursue his photography. He also became affiliated with Aperture, a photography magazine and publisher. Chappell was the driving force behind the Assn. of Heliographers, a group named after a sun-imagery process developed in the early 1800s by Joseph Nicephore Niepce. The group, which included Paul Caponigro and William Clift, offered primarily abstract studies of nature. Their work was well received in New York galleries in the 1960s. After leaving Eastman House, Chappell returned to the West Coast where he lived in Los Angeles, Big Sur, San Francisco and finally settled in New Mexico. A three-time recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, Chappell’s nude photography generated the same type of controversy that would later be stirred by Robert Mapplethorpe. In 1990, a federal prosecutor in Maine tried to prosecute Chappell, saying his photograph of a nude father and his son was obscene. The image, which was exhibited in many galleries and reprinted in a book on American nude photography, was seized by federal officials from a woman in Barnet, Vt. The case was later dropped. The iconoclastic Chappell, a poet, painter and musician, revered the darkroom process and, as a result, produced stunning black and white images. On Tuesday in Santa Fe of complications from lung cancer and a lung infection. Source: findagravedotcomm