J. George Midgley

A native of Salt Lake City, J. George Midgley (1882-1979) was an amateur photographer for more than six decades. He learned the gum bichromate technique, his preferred method, by observation, reading, and experimentation. Because Midgley was less interested in the sub￾ject matter than in the expression the bromoil process could add to it, he avoided professional beauty spots and concentrated instead on the farms that dominated rural Utah in the early part of this century. He began sending works to exhibitions about 1914 and by the 1920s was exhibiting widely in this country and abroad. His mature work became steadily more abstract as he sought sub￾jects with pattern as the principal focus. Many of his abstract works are based on details of abandoned rural structures. Midgley was an artist who found his own way. As a photographer he was largely self-taught, and his choices of subject, treatment, and method were highly personal. He left a body of work that shows a remarkable vision, confidence in his ability, and solid craftsmanship, all factors that account for his acceptance by major salons and presti￾gious institutions. His legacy is a series of images of an earlier Utah embodied in the unusual form he mastered.