Walter Landon Chappell 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. He is primarily known for his black and white photography of landscapes, nature, and the human body. Chappell was also an interior and graphic designer.
Background
Walter Chappell was born on June 8, 1925 in Portland, Oregon, United States. He was the son of a contralto mother Margaret Louise (Willis) Chappell who was a singer with the Portland Symphony Choir. His father Elmer Chappell was a train engineer, and was of part-Native American descent, descending from the Umatilla people.
Walter Chappell spent his early life on the Umatilla Indian Reservation in northeastern Oregon, until the family returned to Portland when he was three years old.
Education
Walter Chappell attended Benson Polytechnic High School, and studied musical composition at the Ellison-White Conservatory of Music (Oregon, 1938-1942). He was apprenticed to Frank Lloyd Wright in 1953-1954 under a Taliesin Fellowship in Scottsdale, Arizona, and studied at International Museum of Photography/George Eastman House in 1957-1960 with Beaumont Newhall and Minor White. He met Edward Weston while living in Monterey and Big Sur (1948-1951).
Career
Walter Chappell served as associate director of the Photography Workshop in Denver in 1955-1957. He 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.
Walter Chappell became a self-employed photographer since 1961.He founded and directed the Association of Heliographers Gallery in New York City (1962-1965). 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. Although most of them were affiliated with the Carl Siembad Gallery in Boston, Walter Chappell proposed to open a gallery in New York City that he ran for the group: The Heliographers" Gallery Archive opened its doors in 1963 at 859 Lexington Avenue. The gallery closed in 1965.
Walter Chappell re-located to San Francisco where he became re-acquainted with Minor White and joined a circle of photographers that included 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 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer 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. Walter Chappell 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 1970-1974, 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 (1977, 1980, 1984).
Walter 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. In 1989 he was given access to and use of one of the famous 20x24" Polaroid view-cameras. 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).
Walter Chappell died of lung cancer on August 8, 2000 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, aged 75.