Outside Influence: Photography in Colorado, 1945-1995

Outside Influence: Photography in Colorado, 1945-1995, is the first detailed account of the state's history of post-World War II interpretive photography. The title "Outside Influence" has a double meaning: it acknowledges landscape's prominence as a subject for photographers in Colorado and alludes to the post-WWII influx of artists and educators whose arrival moved photographic practice far beyond rote representations of mountains and plains.

Drawing from more than 120 personal interviews, Rupert Jenkins identifies the medium's principal in-state creators, mentors, and innovators from the modernist era of film processing to the emergence of interdisciplinary digital practice. He answers fundamental questions about the people and work of this era: Who or what generated this significant body of innovative, noncommercial photographic work? Where did they come from? Who inspired them, and who in turn did they inspire? Throughout the book's ten chapters, Jenkins contextualizes Colorado photography's postwar development with a social, political, and cultural abstract that encompasses national events and trends, significant out-of-state practitioners, and the emerging presence of women and photographers of color.

Jenkins examines the work of photographers like Robert Adams, Walter Chappell, Albert Chong, Barbara Houghton, Winter Prather, Mark Sink, Melanie Walker, Myron Wood, and numerous lesser-known individuals as well as other key figures in Colorado promoting photography as a contemporary artform, such as Cherie Hiser, founder of the Center of the Eye workshop in Aspen. Each of these individuals made indelible contributions to modern photography in the state. As Eric Paddock, curator of photography at the Denver Art Museum, discusses in his foreword, by looking at the schools, workshops, galleries, and museums that supported these artists, Jenkins stresses the importance of collaboration and community to any successful venture.