Grain Elevator, Columbia, Missouri

Abstract aerial view of rail cars and machinery.

Winter Prather was a prominent commercial and fine art photographer working mostly in Denver, Colorado and Taos, New Mexico from the 1940’s to the 1970’s. Prather’s body of work is both masterful and diverse. He shot architectural photographs for commerical clients, informal portraits of lovers and friends, romantic landscapes, and abstract industrial scenes. Many images from early in Prather’s career depict beautiful women, stylish interiors, and the glamor of midcentury design. However, Prather was not just an aesthete, but also an experimenter. His more non-traditional work often features tight compositions of industrial sites and automobiles. He also sought abstract forms in nature, the Denver cityscape, and even the work of other artists. He manipulated many of these images in the darkroom, creating double exposures and printing positives as negatives.

Prather was a success in both artistic and commercial photography. His photographs were featured in Camera, Modern Photography, Domus, American Heritage, Applied Photography, and Holiday. His commercial clients included the Carborundum Company, the Mithun Ad Agency, and Johns Manville, and he was known to bill $1000 per day. He also worked with several local and international architects such as Gio Ponti, who designed the Denver Art Museum. As of the 1960’s, Prather’s work could be found in the permanent collections of the George Eastman House, the Museum of Modern Art, the Amon Carter Museum, the Columbus Art Museum, and the Denver Art Museum.

Yet there is a reason most people have not heard of Prather. In the late 1970’s, Prather began to suffer from increasingly intense bouts of mental unstableness and breaks with reality. Some believe that Prather’s problems may have been the result of the toxicity of the selenium that he used to tone his prints. The deaths of his parents, a failed move to Europe, and an obsession with mysticism only served to exacerbate the photographer’s issues. Then, in the 1980’s, Prather began having difficulty getting work, leading him into poverty and increased mental illness. Prather was committed to the state’s care some time in the 1990’s, his talent largely forgotten.

After Prather’s death in 2005, his work was included in a group show of early contemporary Colorado photography at the now-defunct Gallery Sink in Denver. Randy Roberts, owner of the Z Art Department, attended the show and later had the opportunity to purchase a group of the Prather’s photographs. This resulted in a 200 print retrospective exhibition of Prather’s work as well as an accompanying book.