She is best known for writing the text to accompany photographs by Ansel Adams and Edward Weston, but was also a widely published writer on photography, conservation, and American culture.

She married Beaumont Newhall, the curator of photography at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and substituted for him in that role during his military service in World War II.

Long shots become closeups, the flow of compositional directions, and, with due care for the results on the screen, studies of detail and texture under dramatic lighting, are all ways of lending motion to motionless things.

In addition to lecturing and teaching, the Newhalls photographed the college campus and its people, taking portraits of Leo Amino, Ilya Bolotowsky, Gwendolyn Knight, Jacob Lawrence, and Buckminster Fuller's venetian-blind experiment.

[4] She died on July 7, 1974, at St. Johns Hospital in Jackson Hole, Wyoming, from injuries received in an accident which occurred on the Snake River of Grand Teton National Park.