Don Worth’s photographs reflect his lifelong interest in fostering a relationship with nature, accentuating the patterns and forms found throughout the living world. He cultivated exotic plants from the time he was a boy on an Iowa farm, and his photography often focuses on his homegrown succulents, orchids, and bromeliads. Shrubs in Snow—Yosemite Nat’l Park, Ca. is an early image by Worth made in the first years he began exploring the medium. Striking in its simplicity, it shows an outcropping of dormant, mostly leafless, branches that punctuate the snowy white background with their dark, organic forms. Rather than the sweeping views of Yosemite that we have come to know from the many artistic renderings of this site, Worth instead captured a more concentrated moment that is emotional, spiritual, and evocative, rather than instructional or didactic.
Worth studied music at Mills College, focusing on composition with Darius Milhaud and piano with Alexander Libermann. It was there, in the mid-1950s, that he began photographing with an 8 x 10 view camera. After becoming acquainted with Ansel Adams, he moved to San Francisco to work as his assistant. Worth’s last musical score was composed for the film Ansel Adams, Photographer in 1958. His photographic work can be organized into five major subjects: plant forms, landscape views, still life, urban scenes, and male nudes. While his shift to photography has been described as an effort to create something “more durable,” his images were not intended to be documents. Rather, they should be considered in the context of Alfred Stieglitz’s notion of the “equivalent,” in which the emotion of the source is captured in the photographic image.
Rebecca Morse, Curator, Wallis Annenberg Photography Department
2024
Bibliography
Don Worth: Photographs 1955−1985. Intro by Hal Fischer. Carmel, California: The Friends of Photography, Untitled 40, 1986.
