Like my previous subject, Melanie Walker, I first met Peter de Lory in San Francisco during the late 1980s/early 90s, when he was teaching photography at San Jose State University. I knew him at that time for his narrative-based triptychs, which he describes as “a focal point for all my earlier thoughts and sensibilities” (http://www.peterdelory.com/about-face). Much of those thoughts and sensibilities had coalesced in Colorado during the late sixties/mid seventies, studying photography at Center of the Eye in Aspen, at CU Boulder, and at various workshops in the American West. As he describes in our interview, he left Colorado for Idaho in 1976 to direct the Photography Department of the Sun Valley Center for the Arts and Humanities. He has lived in the Pacific Northwest since 1994.

Rupert Jenkins: You grew up near Cape Cod and moved west for undergrad studies at the San Francisco Art Institute, I think.

Peter de Lory: Yes. I was there from 1967 or ‘68 to 1971. My two brothers had already gone there, and I had visited in 1964 or '65. Also the cultural revolution was there, and I wanted to be part of that for sure. The Art Institute was a very interesting place in itself. Edward Weston had taught there. Ansel Adams ran the program with Minor White, Paul Caponigro was there. Jerry Burchard. It was a pretty hot place for photography on the west coast. John Collier Sr., and Jack Fulton had just shown up. Linda Connor hadn't moved there yet – we were like two ships in the night. I met her just as she was getting ready to teach there. We became close friends.

RJ: And then you went to Aspen, to Center of the Eye?

PdL: In early spring 1969 I had a girlfriend who was at CU Boulder and I visited her there. She had a sister in Aspen. I asked someone what was going on in photography there and they said there’s a man and woman named Cherie Hiser and David Hiser—Cherie Jenkins was her first name—and they’re about to start a school, you should talk to them.

I’d met Cherie at the SPE conference in 1968 in Oakland, and then at Christmas we met again and she invited me [to the workshop]. I went for three summers. I worked in the lab and did these crash courses. I met Minor White, Jerry Uelsmann, Bruce Davidson, Winogrand, the list just goes on and on. The workshops and Aspen, all that vibrancy, people coming in and out, people from different parts of the country, that mixture of people, it was a great time.

Peter de Lory: Cherie Hiser, Center of the Eye, Aspen, 1969.

PdL: Then in 1971 I went to graduate school at CU Boulder (MFA, 1974). I was the second student to graduate from the program—Barbara Jo Revelle was the first. I get to grad school and that fall or spring Minor White called and had me do a whole suite of my work for Aperture—a whole quarter issue while I was still in graduate school (Aperture 17:2, 1973).

Having work in Aperture was something I’d always wanted, but after that I didn’t know what to do. Spring was coming up and I got a call from Cherie saying she was moving to Sun Valley, it’s a cool place, do you want to come up and run the lab, and I said, “Sure.” So I drove up there in my little VW and was there till 1978. Eventually I became director after Cherie. Then I thought, ‘I’ve got to get out of here and do something else.’ I got an NEA grant and just traveled for about six months, then went back to San Francisco eventually.

RJ: You’ve mentioned Minor White a few times. How big an influence was he on you?

PdL: Oh, we were very close. I met him through my brother. We went to his house in Arlington and he immediately looked at my work and said, “Wow, this looks interesting, can I keep these?” I think I’d met him on the fly at Center of the Eye. I didn’t hear back from him until I got back to San Francisco. He said, “I have to think about this, can you send me all the work you’ve done so far?” I said, “Sure, no problem,” then he says, “I want you to be the assistant for me at the workshops in Rochester next summer,” and I said, “Sure.” So, I had a great relationship with him, which is unusual actually [laughs]. He was a very genial guy, very supportive. Also, he picked up the work I had and gave me a show at MIT, and we traded. He was really unbelievably supportive.

RJ: Anyone else who was especially influential on your work?

PdL: Oh, a number of people for various reasons. Minor, Frederick Sommer for sure, Paul Caponigro. He was a student of Minor’s at the Art Institute. Weston of course—clarity of seeing, and Minor was taken by that part of Weston.

Peter de Lory: Double O Ranch (Once Upon A Time In The West), 1989. Gallery Above: Top L-R: Self Portrait, 1969; Floating, Colorado, 1969; Grottoes Rock, 1970. Bottom L-R: Colorado Rover Shore, 1969; Leg in the Barth, 1971; Grottoes, 1970.

RJ: Where do you place your triptychs from the late eighties, in terms of the landscape genre?

PdL: Part of my work is based in the social landscape of our culture, you know? The American West, the myths of the West, embracing this place. Photographing to me is taking really strong notice, and really slowing down, looking at what you’re looking at. Minor was perfect at that. A sense of you being there. If I’m in the presence of that, then perhaps my perspective can be transferred to somebody else’s thinking.

RJ: Your image of an arch in Once Upon A Time In The West (1989) has always stayed with me. That’s an iconic symbol of the West.

PdL: At that time I was reading a lot of Wallace Stenger, and a lot of the American West writers: James Welsh, Edward Abbey of course. It came out of that, reading all that and being in the West. The writing would be so fluent. I thought, how could I make my photographs be like writing? I just wanted, in my small way, to dip into the semi-industrial parts of the West, make a dip into that kind of severity and rawness of the land. I wanted a balance between the two, of being a social landscape and a landscape of awe, basically.

RJ: Some images crop up in different series of yours. You re-use them.

PdL: Yeah, because there’s a continuity of subject, but maybe in a different context. It’s like you’re a singer and you make an album and you put in a couple of older songs with some new ones too—it’s kind of like that. I’ve been photographing this little island, Lopez Island in the San Juan Islands, and I showed my prints at the San Juan Museum with two sculptors and print makers. All the work was very contemplative; it was like taking one long walk, traveling through slowly in a real contemplative way.

I guess the way I look at it is this—when I go to Europe or someplace I can’t photograph very well because I just don’t know the place. This Lopez thing, I just photograph organically, and then about two or three years later I’ll print it. And then it all comes back. … So I call it slow photography. Someone will say “That’s a new triptych,” and I’ll say, “Yes it is,” but I photographed it in 1989. It just didn’t come together until this point.

Peter de Lory: Alex Sweetman & Jay Manis, Center of the Eye, 1969.

RJ: Any last thoughts about Colorado?

PdL: Well, at CU we were pretty isolated in a sense. But Center of the Eye and Cherie, that was incomparable—the timing of that with that culture was just perfect. I can’t tell you how many people I’m in touch with that I knew in Aspen. Cherie pulled a lot of things out of New York through Nathan Lyons, so that created a whole new mixture, an intellectual front that Aspen does not have usually, other than the Aspen Design Conference and those kind of things. It was just a perfect storm of ideas.

END

Note: This interview was compiled from a phone interview with Peter de Lory conducted by the author on November 21, 2017. Edited for length and clarity with Peter de Lory in May 2020. All images courtesy/copyright Peter de Lory.

The Colorado Photo History blog is the online presence for “Outside Influence,” a book project by Rupert Jenkins. As always, please leave a comment or a suggestion for future posts, and visit @coloradophotohistory on Instagram.

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I first met Melanie Walker in San Francisco in the late-eighties, early nineties, when she was teaching photography at San Francisco State and I was working at San Francisco Camerawork gallery. In 1992 she joined the CU Boulder department of art, where she now teaches in the Media Arts Area.

Melanie has received a number of awards including an NEA Visual Arts Fellowship, Colorado Council on the Arts Fellowship and an Aaron Siskind Award. We spoke at her home in Boulder in 2016 and again in 2021. This interview is a shortened version of an edit made by Melanie and myself in May 2022.

RJ: Can we begin by looking at your career path, how you eventually arrived here in Colorado?

MW: It’s challenging to say when my career path began, growing up in a family that was obsessed with photography. When I was about six I learned that not everyone’s father made pictures and I was shocked. I started doing my printing when I was about twelve, working with alternative processes. In high school, I was fortunate to attend a school that had the first photography program in the San Fernando Valley in LA. I was awarded photographer of the year in high school and was exhibiting work at the LA County Fair and National Scholastic Magazine.

When I graduated from high school, the only school I applied to was San Francisco State. I moved to San Francisco in '68 and was there until '72 in undergraduate school. In the interim, my father [the photographer Todd Walker] had been approached by Jerry Uelsmann to teach at the University of Florida Gainesville, while Jerry was on sabbatical. ... After I finished undergraduate school, I tried finding work around the Bay Area but nothing worked out, so I decided to move to Florida and be with my parents for a little bit in the interim. I applied for graduate school at Florida State University in Tallahassee and was accepted. I was the only woman in my program, which was a challenge in and of itself.

I got my Master’s in December 1974 and then started teaching at Pensacola Junior College that next semester. That was my first teaching appointment. I struggled for a few years, trying to find my voice after leaving graduate school, along with finding a way to work and striking a balance with teaching. I applied for jobs and was a finalist at Columbia College and also at SUNY Albany. I ended up going to SUNY Albany. I was there for either two-and-a-half or three years and returned to San Francisco after Neal White asked if I'd like to teach adjunct at San Francisco State.

RJ: Neal White’s a new name to me. Who is he?

MW: He was a professor with Jack Welpott and Don Worth. He'd come out of UCLA. Neal was primarily a filmmaker, but he also did photography. He'd been one of my professors when I was in undergraduate school. Neal was very supportive.

I taught at San Francisco State until 1986 and then I applied for jobs again with adjunct jobs disappearing due to political and economic circumstances in California. I taught at Alfred University for two years in upstate New York mainly to have the opportunity to work with John Wood. Alfred was a college of ceramics and it was impossible to get clean prints because there was clay dust everywhere, so rather than fighting the dust integrated it into my process, intentionally placing my damp negatives into piles of clay dust. I printed them as three-foot square mural prints, applying bleach and toners to many of those prints as part of my Endangered Species series (above). I made the costumes and photographed myself or other people wearing them— a saguaro cactus costume, a rattlesnake costume, an endangered parrot costume, an endangered rabbit, trees, turtles, all kinds of things.

After processing the film, I selected one of the negatives and put rubber cement on parts of it that I didn't want to be distressed. Other parts of the negatives decayed using things like laundry detergent, which is basically sodium carbonate, or I would take a razor blade to them when the emulsion was still wet. I did a lot of research for that project. After I moved to Colorado they were exhibited at the Arvada Center in an installation. I painted the walls to be reminiscent of a weathered Victorian space and exhibited the costumes, and the photographs. There were ten large scale prints altogether with engraved plaques that had the name of the animal in Latin. The frames were made of fake fur and animal skins that related to each of the animals depicted.

*Endangered Species* installation at the Arvada Center, CO, ca. 1995.

In that Endangered Species series there was a particular image of a chimpanzee. The chimpanzee is wearing a bandleader’s uniform and riding on the tricycle. That work is related to my earliest memory from my eye surgeries when I was probably three years old. I woke up strapped in a hospital bed with an eye patch over one eye to see the chimpanzee riding toward me. It was very surreal and has influenced how I experience the world. Also, with my blindness and my double vision I see like a camera. I think that's been a big part of my life journey.

I made that chimpanzee piece because it had always haunted me. A friend who was a gallerist in Orange County, California invited me to do a show along with a woman who was a painter. We'd never met before. We started installing our work and talking only to discover that she'd had the same surgery at the same hospital, the same year, for the same problem. It was the Children's Hospital in Hollywood. Her father came to the opening and she told him of this coincidence. He remembered that a man would bring his pet chimpanzee to the hospital to entertain the children so through making this piece, I found out that this image, which had always haunted me, that was so surreal, was something that really happened.

RJ: Can you talk about your MisNomer series? (Above, L-R: MisAllegiance; MisChose; MisIlluminate.)

MW: It started with a family history. I grew up in a weird family and puns were common around the house. My sister and I would come home from school and we'd talk about something that happened in class that was a misunderstanding and he would say, “it's Miss-Understood, 1962." That kind of personal history was part of the MisNomer pageant although there is a very serious side as well. “Mis-” as a prefix on a word means wrong or incorrect and as women, historically we have been referred to as Miss + the father’s name until marriage, so I was questioning the gender biases inherent in language.

RJ: This was a costume project as well?

MW: Yes. I made all the costumes. The photographs were all self-portraits. For MisUnderstood, I made a shoe hat and a costume that was reminiscent of a checkerboard floor. It's challenging to illustrate language through pictures. MisHap included broken dishes. MisAllegiance refers to the Statue of Liberty with a costume made of stars and stripes along with a white wig and a tiara with a star on it and I was holding a globe. MisConception was made from appropriated images of a fetus in vitro and the costume included a clutch purse as well as a birth control pillbox hat.

The images were made with a 35mm film which I printed onto a transparency film. I used sandpaper, razor blades and paint working to either add or subtract from the original images. In some cases I layered my transparent images with other images from the history of photography. In MisAllegiance, I used one of Robert Capa's photographs of the soldiers at war and a bomb exploding. In MisJudge, the background was one of John Hartfield's self-portraits.

RJ: How did you do that? Were these double exposures, collage, or …

MW: It was more like montage and part of the Polaroid materials grant so I used Polaroid 55P/N film. I rephotographed the manipulated film with a 4 x 5 view camera and in some cases I used my dad's process camera that he built.

Todd Walker at Center of the Eye, Aspen, c. 1970. Photographer unknown. Collection of Alex Sweetman/Cherie Hiser Archive

RJ: Your father was a huge influence on you.

MW: Just in terms of constantly working and experimenting. He had a lot of successes when he was in the advertising world and decided when he left the commercial work behind that he was going to do his work for himself. This was before there was any sort of market for art photography.

RJ: What time period are we talking about now?

MW: This was in the ’70s, after he'd moved to Florida. He was a colorist and a lot of his work was based on challenging the Zone System. He dissected his black-and-white images making a variety of exposures to get different values and tones out of one image. He then put them back together assigning a color to each value he was able to extract from each negative. He was driven by his work ethic and that has stayed with me.

He started self-publishing artist books in 1965. He named it The Thumb Print Press. My mother got him a letterpress, so he started hand-setting type and taught himself how to do the collotype process, which was the very beginning of image reproduction. His first portfolios and books were all done with collotype. … He was also an early adopter of historical processes in the early sixties due to his prowess with chemistry, as well as digital, acquiring a computer in 1981. He taught himself machine language so that he could write programs in order to manipulate his black-and-white negatives, again, employing his unique color sense that he developed from cleaning paint buckets. His example was so inspiring, working because he was inquisitive and wanted to see where the work would go next.

END OF PART ONE

All images by Melanie Walker unless noted.

This interview is edited from two separate recordings made on November 22, 2016 and August 21, 2021. It was edited for clarity and length with Melanie Walker in May 2022.

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Colorado Photo History

This blog is the online presence for Outside Influence: Photography in Colorado 1945-1995, a book and research project by Rupert Jenkins. Publication date: November 2025; publisher: University Press of Colorado.

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