Beaumont Newhall; Artistic Photographer, Historian

Beaumont Newhall, artistic photographer, historian, curator and professor of photography, died Friday in Santa Fe, N.M. He was 84.

Newhall died in the city where he had lived in retirement after a stroke, said Van Deren Coke of Santa Fe. Coke had succeeded Newhall as curator of the International Museum of Photography at George Eastman House in Rochester, N.Y.

“I just want to convey the excitement and importance of photography. I consider that to be my job in life,” Newhall said as he summed up his long and varied career for Times art critic Suzanne Muchnic during a rare exhibit of his photographs in Los Angeles.

Educated at Harvard University in art history, Newhall was perhaps most widely known for his reference work, “The History of Photography,” published in 1937 and updated throughout his life.

Newhall’s written archives, including correspondence with the century’s top artistic photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson, Edward Weston, Alfred Steiglitz and Ansel Adams, have been obtained by the John Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles.

As an artistic photographer, Newhall was unusual in that he liked to work in color, while his contemporaries preferred black and white.

“Perhaps color makes things look too realistic,” he told The Times. “For me, it seems color can extend the photograph’s power of recording by relating the ‘thingness’ of things. I want iron to be iron and stone to be stone in my work. Color helps that.”

Newhall began his career at the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1935, he became the librarian for the neophyte Museum of Modern Art in New York. In 1940, he became the museum’s first curator of photography, supervising a staff of eight and a darkroom in the elderly building’s only restroom.

Asked to organize an exhibition of his own choosing, Newhall created “Photography From 1839-1937,” which grew into his history book, long considered the bible of photographic history.

In 1948, Newhall moved on to become curator and then director of Kodak’s fledgling museum in Rochester. Leaving the institution in 1971, he was made an honorary trustee of that International Museum of Photography in 1980.

Newhall was a professor of art at the University of New Mexico from 1971 to 1984.

Amy Conger of Riverside, who met him when she was a graduate student and helped him create his 1983 book “Edward Weston Omnibus,” remembered Newhall as “an extraordinarily generous man as far as giving information and helping other people.” His colleagues, she said, referred to him as “the father of the history of photography.”

Newhall’s other books include “The Photographs of Henri Cartier-Bresson,” “Masters of Photography,” “The Daguerreotype in America,” “The Discovery of Photography” and “Airborne Camera: The World from the Air and Outer Space.”

Newhall is survived by his second wife, Christy.