Don Worth

Don Worth (June 2, 1924 – March 18, 2009) was an American photographer. His childhood on an Iowa farm inspired an abiding love of exotic horticulture, which later became the primary focus of his photography. He attended Juilliard as well as the Manhattan School of Music, receiving a graduate degree in piano and composition in 1951. During college, he began photographing and eventually became Ansel Adams' first full-time assistant in 1956. He taught photography at San Francisco State University for thirty years becoming a Professor Emeritus of Art.In 1974, Worth was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and an appointment from the National Endowment for the Arts in 1980. His photographs are included in countless major museums including the Getty, MOMA and Chicago Art Institute. He was one of the last surviving members of the West Coast school of photography, which included Ansel Adams, Edward and Brett Weston, Imogen Cunningham, Ruth Bernhard and many others.Worth's large format photographs are marked by an incisive clarity and quiet meditative aura. His images of plants invoke a spiritual iconography while his landscapes often reflect the transformative powers of fog and mist. Don Worth painstakingly created each of his photographs in his darkroom. "The techniques of photography are not very hard to master. The difficult thing is to become a sentient, cognitive human being. If anyone is going to be good at this thing, they must push themselves to levels of sensory awareness that are beyond the ken of ordinary mortals. Don's photographs are solid evidence that he has scaled these heights. He is a solitary man who has dedicated himself to the search for truth in those living things which can perhaps save us from ourselves, if only we will listen. the messages from this teeming realm are poetically expressed in don's photographs. Look well and learn the secrets of our survival." "Don Worth's plants are legendary. As a child growing up on a small farm in southern Iowa, he rai