Things Seen for Themselves
Five Photographs from the
Search for Form, 1959 - 1962
In the years 1959 - 1962, between attending Ansel
Adams' Yosemite workshop and inviting Minor White to conduct the first Denver Workshop,
I find that the surviving negatives reveal a consistent search for form.
This does not surprise me. I had been influenced most by Adams and by Edward Weston,
whose photographs of the landscape and eroded sandstone of Point Lobos were seen
as discoveries of significant form.
During those years I was variously employed: as an engineer/photographer at Stanley
Aviation, documenting B-58 escape capsule design tests; as a 16mm movie maker producing
advertising and travel promotion films for state agencies in Colorado and Wyoming;
and, as an independent commercial photographer making advertising, public relations,
architectural and fashion photographs for the Denver business community.
My principal camera was the Hasselblad, a machine of immense precision whose design
encouraged careful composition and precise recording, certainly a machine that was
comfortable for both my eye and my intentions.
Free to photograph for myself only on weekends, and constrained by poverty to what
seemed at the time to be the bleak urban landscape of Denver (except for a singular
trip to Taos, New Mexico) the following five photographs are typical of the period.
Arnold Gassan
© 1998, Arnold Gassan, Tucson,
Arizona