Over the Hill

J. George Midgley was born in Salt Lake City. He attended LDS Business College and became a successful insurance executive. In about 1910 he bought a camera and began to make photographs. Through reading and experimentation, Midgley taught himself to make prints using the rare bromoil transfer method, which produces an exquisite artistic quality similar to handprinted etchings or lithographs. He eventually became one of the nation’s leading practitioners of this method. (Very few photographers today have embraced this difficult and painstaking process.) By the 1920s, his highly personal, and increasingly abstract work was being exhibited widely in the U.S. and abroad. Ten of Midgley’s bromoil photographs are in the permanent archives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and others are in Utah public and private collections, including the Springville Museum of Art, the State Historical Society, the Utah Museum of Fine Arts, and the LDS Church History Museum.

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