Walter Chappell
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.
Biography
Chappell was a constant presence in American 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, New York 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 photographic technician in the printing process.
Walter Chappell traveled extensively during his career. Following a relocation to Big Sur, California, where he was commissioned by MGM to photograph Sharon Tate, 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 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.[1]
References
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