But painting was his first great and overwhelming ambition. From 1934 to 1938, deep in the Depression, he attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, drew from plaster casts and live models, learned the techniques of water color and oil, and chose Alexey Brodovitch as his major instructor. Brodovitch, the legendary art director of Harper’s Bazaar, through his design courses and later photography classes, influenced such photographers as Richard Avedon, Hiro, Lisette Model, Diane Arbus – and Irving Penn. He encouraged Penn’s design work and invited him to be his assistant at the magazine during two summers and to work with him on several personal projects. Occasionally, Brodovitch asked Penn to make small drawings, a few of which were published in the magazine. Penn was barely out of his teens.

For many years, aspiring artists yearned to be painters the way mountain climbers yearn to conquer Everest and little boys yearn to be president (or firemen). Though he had no intention of being a photographer, Penn bought a Rolleiflex as an aide mémoire with the money he earned from his drawings, and in fact he took photographs that already showed his strong sense of composition and graphic design. But what he wanted deep in his heart was to earn the honorific “painter.” In 1941, when he was working as an art director at Saks Fifth Avenue, the kind of job his art school classmates considered a stepping-stone to heaven, he quit to spend a year living on meager means in Mexico to devote his life to canvas. Irving Penn had determination bordering on obsession in his bones, determination to be the best he could and perhaps simply the best. This was coupled with a nagging uncertainty that he could reach that pinnacle, an uncertainty he never quite put to rest. That may be one definition of perfectionism, which he wore like a glove; one observer says he was not easy to work with, and “even objects had to comply” – when an assignment was to show the instant a tray full of glasses fell, he insisted that all the glasses, in all the trial shots, be Baccarat. Yet Penn’s steely determination drove past his insecurities onto high ground over and over again. He judged himself strictly: at the end of that year in Mexico he decided he wasn’t good enough to live up to his own standards, and he took his linen canvases into the bathtub and washed off every trace of not-good-enough. Later, he sometimes used his erased paintings as tablecloths.

When he returned from Mexico, Alexander Liberman, another extraordinary art director, hired him as an associate at Vogue. Penn did layouts and drew cover designs for photographers, who neither liked nor followed them. At length Liberman, who had seen some of Penn’s photographs, suggested he take them himself. Penn’s first Vogue cover, in 1943, was a color still life, the magazine’s first still-life cover. In 1944, Penn volunteered for the American Field Service, driving ambulances and taking photographs overseas until the end of the war. He then returned to Vogue and immediately began taking fashion pictures, still lifes, and portraits.

He was a modest man, private, formal, rather shy, and reticent. He spoke so softly that at times one might have been grateful for an ear trumpet. Scarcely the Hollywood profile of a revolutionary, even a revolutionary artist– yet by 1947 he had sweepingly revised the traditions of both fashion photography and portraiture (more on portraits later), and in time he would toss in the resurrection of a nearly-forgotten process as spare change. He began by throwing overboard all the standard procedures. Fashion photography in the 1930s, influenced by Edward Steichen and European sources, tended toward a cinematic and dramatic lighting, with elaborate poses and gestures, cleverly designed backgrounds, and suggestions of theatrical situations or narrative. Penn wiped the slate as clean as his linen canvases. His fashion photographs were exceedingly simple and pared down – context, story-telling props, and extravagant artifice had been removed as if by a scalpel in the hand of a surgeon intent on removing moribund tissue to reveal clean skin.

His light was soft, even, and clear, more like the liquid light of day than the strong light and hard-edged shadows that were de rigeur in fashion magazines. For years Penn daydreamed about a studio with a northern skylight letting in the light of the outdoors; the kind of light that nineteenth-century photographers worked with. In 1946-47 he designed a bank of tungsten lights on a ceiling track to approximate a skylight.8 Behind most of his fashion models was a gray and lightly mottled wall or a plain white sheet of paper setting off the stark blacks of clothing. In 1950 he would carry this kind of contrast to its logical, striking conclusion: a picture of Jean Patchett in a black jacket, white scarf and gloves, a black hat with a white band around it and a black veil. The image, without modeling and only a few tiny and faint shadows, was set against a bare white ground on the cover of Vogue, where all the type was black, and the model looked off to the side as if to avoid the photographer’s stare.

This bold graphic approach was particularly apt for the simpler, pragmatic clothes designed by young Americans conscious of shortages brought on by a world war and the new freedom women had found during that conflict. But the fashion world, having never seen such images, was up in arms; some vehemently against, some equally for. “For the first few years,” Liberman said, “Penn and I were thought of as dangerous destroyers of good manners in a world of ladies in status hats and white gloves.” It was not the first time and it would not be the last that an assault on good manners would change the manners themselves: in a few years magazines adopted Penn’s light, and for a while some photographers imitated his brash simplicity, never quite achieving his audaciously minimal elegance.

The first postwar years were a time for fresh beginnings, and Penn and Richard Avedon, Penn’s only real rival and equal at the time, both changed the temperature of fashion photography in highly individual ways. Avedon employed white backgrounds in his own manner to great stylistic success. When he photographed the Paris collections beginning in 1947, he took his models outside to street performances and set them in motion, descending stairs in swirling skirts that the French, after lean years, at last had sufficient fabric to create. When Vogue sent Penn to photograph the collections in 1950, he was delighted to spend his days inside an old daylight studio with a discarded theater curtain bearing all the marks of age upon it for backdrop.10 His pictures were immensely still; occasional stances and gestures wrote temperamental lines across the surface. His models were engaged in no activity but modeling and no encounter with anyone or anything but the camera; they were isolated within the proposition of displaying two objects of beauty and desire: the couture and themselves. Penn, an exacting craftsman, understood and communicated the delicacies of couturier design and dressmaking. He photographed fashion excerpts and minutiae, like a voluminous, pouffed sleeve or a gauntlet with a diaphanous kerchief attached to it. Fashion photography, today more focused on life style, no longer takes close-ups of details very often, partly because the skills that produced such details are no longer available in quantity.

In Paris Penn took one of the lasting icons of fashion photography, the picture of Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn – he married her in 1950 – in the Mermaid Dress, as well as other stunning pictures of the latest fantasies of female allure. The Mermaid Dress picture and a couple of others show the theater curtain’s edge and a bit of studio wall behind it, a signature mark of Penn’s, a reminder that the dress and make-up are not the only constructs; the studio and the photograph are equal players in that game. Penn was adept at undercutting the camera’s assumed realism and the carefully engineered seduction of his scenes when he wanted to, by saying, in effect, this is only a photograph, it’s a set-up, beware of being entirely taken in. Yet more intrinsic to his thinking is the fact that the curtain’s edge is irregular, a little rough, setting off the elevated glories of superb bone structure, figure, materials, and tailoring with a decidedly imperfect and evidently worn element – as  if to say, “All good things must come to an end.”

This idea is key to Penn’s work and pervades it. Fascinated with entropy and preoccupied with decay, far more fascinated with the ultimate end of all things than with fashion, he injected reminders whenever he could into unexpected places. Fashion was in a sense what happened to him when he found work he could thrive on, but his curiosity was practically boundless. He once said to me, “I can get obsessed with anything if I look at it long enough. That’s the curse of being a photographer.”

When it came to faces and what he could find there, Penn (and minutes later Avedon) brought about what could fairly be called a revolution in studio portraiture by changing the nature of the relationship between photographer and subject. When Hollywood stars sat for Hollywood portraits in the 1930s, they expected to be turned into gods and goddesses of the screen, and so they were. Portraits of celebrated people in the immediate postwar years made a point of telling you who the sitters were or what they were famous for by referring to their work or their work spaces. Writers, artists, politicians, the famous of every ilk expected to be, and were, shown as the best of what they were and the best of themselves. People went to a studio to be flattered; it was their due. Penn turned that on its head.

He once made out a list of people he’d like to photograph; decades later he recalled, “I was shivering at putting these gigantic figures on a list.” His portraits removed identifying context and substituted for it two simple, unprecedented, inelegant, and psychologically charged settings. In 1947 he began with a rug he’d picked up when he passed a junk shop, one of those items that pleased him with its evidence of wear and tear and intimations of ultimate disintegration. Distinguished people came to lean on it, sit on it, drape themselves over it. Alfred Hitchcock looked like an overstuffed bag that had sprouted a suspicious head (Janet Flanner wrote Penn that this portrait “is a fine piece of monstrosity, practically straight Goya.”)13 George Jean Nathan and a world-weary H. L. Mencken were half hidden behind the rug, each with a hand to his chin and one of Mencken’s hands advancing between them as if it belonged to both. Christian Dior slumped on the rug like an empty sack, his head nodding off to one side, his body and legs weightlessly vanishing into blackness. These were (and still are) arresting pictures, as nothing quite like them had been seen before.

Penn also built a narrow corner from two studio flats and let subjects arrange themselves as they would; he said he invented it because he felt unequal to his famous subjects.14 Some of these images pull back to reveal the rough edges of the flats, emphasizing yet again the contrivance of the photograph and the imperfection of the means. Individuals reacted to this tight spot in individual ways. Marcel Duchamp leaned back comfortably against the corner with a little smile, George Grosz leaned forward anxiously in a too-small chair in this too-small space, Truman Capote knelt on the chair and huddled defensively in a coat that was so much too large it utterly defeated his body. (Penn photographed him again years later as a thoughtful man whose eyes are nonetheless closed to the camera and anything else worth seeing.) Georgia O’Keeffe shrank so deeply into the corner she seemed to be shriveling away. These people were in a tight spot and literally cornered, potential prey to all the anxieties left over from a war and a bomb that changed the world. They were also irretrievably alone, with no one to communicate with but the photographer. Penn said he didn’t direct them or make “very small talk” but might say something like, “How does it feel to you if you realize this eye looking at you is the eye of 1,200,000 people looking at you…?”

Penn flattered his models but not his heroes. He thought of himself as neutral, attempting to cut through the façade and find something the subject might not even realize was there. He felt not a shred of obligation to make his subjects attractive. Angry letters filled his mailbox. Georgia O’Keeffe so hated her portrait that Penn never published it in her lifetime. But he was not working for O’Keeffe or anyone else before his lens but for a magazine’s pages. He defined the largely unacknowledged but bedrock difference between a portrait commissioned by the sitter and one commissioned by a magazine: “Many photographers feel their client is the subject,” he said. “Karsh does. My client is a woman in Kansas who reads Vogue. I’m trying to intrigue, stimulate, feed her. My responsibility is to the reader. A severe portrait which is not the greatest joy in the world to the subject may be enormously interesting to the reader.”17 And in a sense his real obligation was to his very demanding self, to make the finest picture he could make, the devil take any lurking vanity.

His portraits were not only stunning, many of them enduringly so, but they opened the door to the kind of celebrity portraiture so familiar since the 1960s, distinctly unflattering but distinctive pictures which at length devolved into just-get-my-face-in-the-media-and-the-rest-doesn’t-matter photographs. Abroad in 1950 without his corner set-up, then back home later, Penn moved in extremely close to T.S. Eliot, Richard Burton, Henry Moore, Colette, Picasso. Picasso’s face was so deep in shadow and buried in a pulled-up collar and a pulled-down hat that all that emerged was barely half his nose, an ear, and a single burning eye. Colette was eighty and confined to bed; her husband said the picture “was a startling image, but was also an act of treachery, an intrusion upon her inmost being. It laid bare all that Colette liked to conceal – and doubtless something about herself of which not even she was aware…” Sometimes Penn got so close he cut off foreheads (see the sad face of S.J. Perelman, the writer of wittily amusing stories), and sometimes he placed his half-length subjects behind a table as if they were speaking to us at an uncomfortably close distance. Mr. and Mrs. Gilbert H. Grosvenor (he was the editor of National Geographic) sat behind such a table, he in bow tie, waistcoat with chain, and disapproving look, she with crimped white hair, wrinkles, and an air of caution, the picture a kind of upper-class Wasp version of American Gothic.

Penn was at least as interested in the lower strata of society and in less sophisticated societies in general as he was in the upper crust of adornment, good looks, or achievement. In 1948, when Vogue sent him to Peru for a fashion spread, he stayed on in Cuzco to photograph the inhabitants. He discovered a daylight studio and got helpers to bring country people to his door. Unaccustomed to posing, some of them even unaccustomed to cameras, they shook with nervousness and went rigid with fear. Penn posed them by hand with difficulty. He presented them centered and before a mottled gray backdrop, as formally arranged as any of his fashion models. Shoeless or tattered, they were entirely self-possessed, often with chins proudly lifted, in their hand-woven, multi-layered winter garments. Two barefoot children with raggedy clothes and adult faces hold hands upon a small table between them; a kneeling man steadies his imperious little girl on a table; three men sit on the floor, wrapped up in striped blankets and knitted face masks against the cold. Penn was surprised and touched when many of those fearful subjects turned up again the next day.19 Did they come for the money he paid them? Certainly, but the close and serious attention to themselves may have counted too. Penn spoke of certain unsophisticated subjects as being transformed when they came into the studio. Lionel Tiger, a sophisticated anthropologist, wrote about being photographed by Penn that he’d had a feeling “of giving more than I had, of being more than I was, of telling more than my story.”

In Paris in 1950, when Penn was photographing haute couture and celebrities, Liberman suggested that he make portraits of workers in the petits métiers, the little trades. The  petits métiers, particularly characteristic of Paris, had been slowly disappearing for years; Parisian photographers like Atget and Brassai occasionally photographed those still at work on the streets. Vogue hired Robert Doisneau, who photographed all the nooks, crannies, and denizens of Paris, to find subjects for Penn, who didn’t know who Doisneau was. Penn posed a glazier, a coalman, a news vendor, a waiter, in their working clothes, full length before his favorite dappled backdrop, much as he had his fashion models, and was so captivated that he went on to photograph the little trades in London and New York – a  rag and bone man; a sewer cleaner; a New York street photographer in a long coat beside a large-format camera on a tripod, looking like he might almost have walked in off a nineteenth-century sidewalk. Penn said the Parisians were suspicious but came for the fee, Londoners were proud, but the Americans were unpredictable: “In spite of our cautions, a few arrived for their sitting having shed their work clothes, shaved, even wearing dark Sunday sits, sure this was their first step on the way to Hollywood.”

All of these workers, beautifully lit with strong shadows on their faces and their dark clothes seldom admitting much modeling, stand tall and are often in bold poses. There have been times in painting and photography when full-length portraits cost more than half-length and under the circumstances favored the well born; the tradesmen, poised in the center with their accompanying implements, are as dignified as any aristocrat. Indeed, before the lens they have become aristocrats of their professions: entirely self-assured, even prepossessing, no matter what their gear or shabby clothes.

Penn could focus easily on widely varying subjects one after another, in part because he could become wholly absorbed in such a wide spectrum of things and people when he was behind his camera, in part because he seems to have regarded people from entirely different backgrounds and stations as equally interesting, possibly even equal. Certainly he took similar approaches to almost everyone who posed before him.

His interest in the lower echelons of society (and what might be called the lowest echelons of objects, which would later enter his still lifes) precedes his career. The photographs he made in the late 1930s and early 1940s, before he was a photographer, are very much of a time when photographers set out to witness a Depression, paid attention to people at the bottom of the economic ladder, and noticed how signs and advertising had become an environment as surely as paved streets had. He photographed poor blacks in the South and signs that were mostly hand-painted, “vernacular” notices, some of them missing letters or flaking off.

When it came to objects, he could make watermelon and gold watches as tantalizing as wishes, but his still lifes for Vogue alsomake clear that he valued the intrusions of everyday life into the carefully arranged paradises of commercial photography. “I began with still life,” he said, recalling his 1943 cover. “I didn’t have any sense of strength to deal with human beings at the time, either personal or photographic strength.” John Szarkowski, who curated a large Penn exhibition at MoMA in 2001, wrote that he couldn’t find any still lifes in earlier issues of the magazine and thought Penn probably introduced the genre to fashion magazines. Luscious in color, and generally luscious in black-and-white as well, Penn’s idylls of fruit and wine glasses, compotes and torn loaves of bread are anchored by gravity but often with only a nominal indication of a table to rest on. Then there are the intruders: a fly sits on a blazing yellow lemon; a charred match and its ashes lie by a perilously balanced composition of playing cards, dice, and poker chips; broken off cherry stems and a small beetle join the Elements of a Party. The results are a version of classicism with a view toward misrule and debility. He also photographed flowers for Vogue, magisterial red poppies and purple tulips heraldically set off by white backgrounds; afterwards, he photographed them as their petals wept their way to the ground on the path to death.

In Summer Sleep, a young woman, asleep beside a fan, a coffee cup, a piece of fruit and a fly swatter, is seen through a screen that flies crawl over – Penn affixed them, dead, to the outside of the screen with great care. And in The Empty Plate, an editorial photograph for House & Garden in 1947, the napkin is as crumpled as a piece of foil and the plate is full of food spatters, some of which have migrated to the table cloth. (Penn preceded artistic explorations more than once. The attitude toward food in The Empty Plate would be taken even further by Daniel Spoerri (who probably did not know Penn’s photograph), in the 1960s, when he hung on a gallery wall the remains of a meal eaten by Marcel Duchamp.) In Penn’s late still lifes for Vogue, in the 1990s, the objects themselves, rather than the leftovers or incidental intruders, could be disturbing – skinned frogs’ legs, an oozing oyster – and served up floating on a blank white page.

The unwelcome participants in the still lifes have some reference in seventeenth-century Dutch paintings where occasional insects, broken glasses and obvious memento mori like hour glasses remind us that these things too will vanish with time. Yet the mainstream of still life in the twentieth century – cubism’s pitchers and guitars, Giorgio Morandi’s bottles, Edward Weston’s peppers – was far more appreciative then premonitory. Penn was once again contradicting tradition.

At the end of the 1940s, Penn made a series of nudes, using fleshy artists’ models, most distinctly unbeautiful (at least by conventional standards), all anonymously headless: the imperfect world in place of the manufactured dream of beauty in Vogue. Some were in contorted or ungainly poses or arranged like near-abstract sculptures. A decade later, when magazine production values had declined, he decided to print these pictures in platinum, once valued for its subtlety and artistic qualities. But platinum paper had not been manufactured for years, and the technique was virtually forgotten. Determined as always, Penn spent hours scouring the library and many more hours in the darkroom; by the late 1960s he had revived and elaborated on an outmoded tradition and an almost-vanished technique. The nudes were first shown in 1980; the postal restrictions in 1950 would have prevented their being published back then.

In the 1970s, Penn, smitten with the look of people from distant cultures and keen to photograph them, devised a traveling studio and took it to places like Morocco, Dahomey, Nepal, and New Guinea. He photographed people in their native costumes and posed them once more like his fashion models or celebrities, in the center of the picture against a washy gray ground, without props except for the weapons some carried. In Africa and New Guinea, the clothes, whether minimal or maximal, and the jewelry, feathers, nose ornaments, wigs, ornamental cicatrices, masks, and face and body paint were not merely strange to western eyes, but complicated, intricate, extravagantly artistic. The pictures were severely criticized. Penn was accused of treating native people as if they were outlandish fashion plates, exploiting them as the exotic Other. Penn explained his preference for studio photography over reports of daily life, saying he “had even developed a taste for pictures that were somewhat contrived. I had accepted for myself a stylization that I felt was more valid than a simulated naturalism.” He also noted that modern life so efficiently dissolved cultures that his photographs would become documents and preserve some part of a vanished world.

The anthropologist Edmund Carpenter had another thought, that these images not only “enlarged membership in the world community,” but they also “record a major change in human identity,” when people who had never seen themselves suddenly did so.”24 Carpenter also threw a raking light on the vexed issue of documentation. Penn made a photograph of Three Asaro Mud Men of New Guinea, 1970, armed with bows, arrows, and threatening mud masks. He posed his subjects by hand, as he didn’t speak their language, and discovered that in this culture, if you touched someone, that was regarded as an embrace and elicited a hug in return: “It’s a picture made up of a lot of double embraces.”25 Penn also related that “the masks recall a battle in which their remote ancestors, driven into a river by an enemy tribe, emerged mud-covered. Their attackers, thinking them evil spirits, turned and ran.”26 Carpenter, however, says the mud men were “invented” by Trans-Australian Airlines, which scheduled a lunch stop for a busload of tourists at a village halfway to their destination. Since there was no entertainment in that village, the airline designed costumes and dances that convinced tourists, a photographer, and generations of photography lovers that they had witnessed authentic native culture.

Penn’s work, which sparked debate the moment he started in fashion photography, continued to generate controversy. In 1975 the Museum of Modern Art exhibited his platinum prints of discarded cigarette butts, and two years later the Metropolitan Museum showed his platinum prints of urban debris; both caused what passes for an uproar in critical circles. Some thought art museums had no business showing work by a fashion photographer, others that the images were pretentious; still others questioned whether it was appropriate to record street trash in precious metal. Yet it would not be long before museums would be hanging fashion photographs on their walls and hosting an array of street trash in scatter-art installations. Once again, Penn was early. Artists would soon be replicating everyday objects in expensive metals, and the art vs. commerce conflict would begin to fade as the distinctions between high and low art were erased.

The cigarette butts, photographed vertically and monumentally as if they were crumpled and afflicted trees, and the run-over gloves and paper cups dredged up from the street, continued Penn’s career-long obsession with decay and death. Objects, too, suffer the universal law of mortality. A series of still lifes made several years later from pitchers, chunks of discarded metal arranged in precarious balance, bits of bone, and human skulls –perhaps not Penn’s most authoritative work – make  the message unmistakable. Penn had long ago erected a barrier against the uncontrollable forces of entropy: a style of delicate balance and near-perfect elegance. “The world is only chaotic,” he said; “for me, the process is to bring order.”

But he repeatedly acknowledged that the laws of the universe trumped artifice, that insects would invade the most magnificent fruit bowl, that objects wore out, that time, disorder, and death won every match. As Robert Browning put it, “What’s come to perfection perishes.” And Issey Miyake wrote in the book of dazzlingly inventive photographs Penn took of Miyake’s clothing designs, “Maybe the really creative person is someone with a little touch of poison. Or a lot of poison.”Or a knowledge of the bitter taste of death.

Vicki Goldberg, an American photography critic and historian, resides in New Hampshire, USA. With expertise in the field, she has authored books and articles exploring photography’s social history and its impact.

To be there at the door of history, to know what it is like to live fully in one’s time and within the moment that is given, to know the direction of the blowing wind and to catch it and ride it. Margaret Bourke-White was bombed and survived, was strafed and survived, was torpedoed and survived, and she fell from the sky in a helicopter and survived. She dared high places—along the face of the new Chrysler Building in New York City, for instance—and she acted as one with the lowly and looked death in the eye. And when her own time came early, at 67, she died in a home where her wall displayed a poster-sized image of the trees she had photographed in Czechoslovakia.

Maggie the Indestructible began her serious work in photography with Clarence White, one of artists who led the process of defining a beautiful photograph early in the 20th century, and who established a school in his name, associated with Columbia University, where, in 1922, Bourke-White had enrolled as an undergraduate to study biology. Her elective study with White formed a strong orientation to the compositional priorities of Pictorialism, and she continued to fill the frame of her image with clarity and strength. That was her skill— filling up the frame, grandly, leaving little for guesswork.

After college (she graduated from Cornell University in 1927) her soft focus crystallized to a modernist’s hard edge. She found a subject in the musculature of the heavy industry in the Cleveland area. “A dynamo is as beautiful as a vase,” she said. And while her work followed the rhetorical lessons of Pictorialism, such as with the effective use of repetition in Hydro Generators, Niagara Falls Power Company and Fort Peck Dam (the cover image from that first Life magazine, November 23, 1936), it became something else. Yes, she took the lesson from Arthur Wesley Dow, the early 20th century critic and lecturer she heard at Columbia, who argued for the dramatic effect of a slice of light or rake of shadow. This affect appears dramatically in Romance of Steel, with a title still clinging to the connotations of a previous era. The image won first prize in the 1930 Cleveland Museum of Art regional exhibition. But Bourke-White’s sympathies were elsewhere—no longer with the connotations of soft focus. Her lens looked hard at just what was out there. New technologies had grown up in this fast changing 20th century. Her photographs carried the banner of change, and the tough mind and hopeful spirit of a New Deal.

She quickly rose in opportunity and fame, as Henry R. Luce’s favorite photographer. He discovered her and in 1929, brought her on for Fortune, his new magazine, and for its first year, she was the magazine’s only photographer. Then in 1936, Luce brought her over to his new Life. Bourke-White was confident, tough and smart. She got it done, and usually better than expected. That first cover, assigned to reveal the largest earthen dam in America, developed in her eye as a story about the new life on the frontier, now on the shoulders of technology rather than cattle, not simply a story about a big public work. She had covered the industrial development of Russia and had been the first outsider to gain permission there. She knew what she was doing, and how to look around corners for the full story. Her powerfully designed, bold-yet-simple compositions captured the Soviet’s sense of themselves as an emerging power. Then she photographed the Dust Bowl in the Midwest and sharecroppers in the South. She worked with the novelist Erskine Caldwell, later her husband of three years (1939–42). Their fine book together, You Have Seen Their Faces, about the Depression South, is not sufficiently recognized. If it takes liberties with quotations, it remains assertively true to the facts of the matter of poverty, and it effected significant social change.

When she had the chance, she took the liberty to pose and design a shot; she was notorious for packing hundreds of pounds of gear, including multiple flash setups that she employed to render the dark insides of industrial sites that attracted her. She overshot and counted on her assistants back at Life, a staff the envy of her colleagues, to process and print, when feasible, to her specifications.

Her work, almost always made for publication, is rarely signed. Of the 335 images (and 75 contact sheets) by Bourke-White in the George Eastman House collection, only three are signed, “Bourke White” on two lines, with a great flourishing “W”, though she also signed her full name more modestly, too. Two of the images are signed on the mount in the lower right, and one on the print in the lower left. The remainder is stamped by her—“A Margaret Bourke-White Photograph”—with the stamp or copyright of the originating publication.

She also published with The New York Times Magazine and the short-lived liberal newspaper without ads, PM. Finally, she created several portfolios—one with Time-Life just before she died, another about Russia in the early ’30s. Bourke-White was first in line to cover the Second World War in North Africa and in Europe, following General Patton into Germany and documenting the concentration camp horrors of Buchenwald upon cease-fire. “Nothing attracts me like a closed door,” she said in her autobiography, Portrait of Myself in 1963.

The late Jack Naylor, a pilot during the war who became a prominent collector of photographs and photo technology, remembered clicking the shutter of her camera for her breezy self-portrait in front of his plane. He would take her on reconnaissance flights and into combat, and recalled her fearlessness and fierce determination to get the image. After the War, she continued to report on the conflicts in India over partition with Pakistan, and on labor conditions in the mines in South Africa; and later on, the guerilla conflicts after ceasefire in Korea. Only the development of Parkinson’s disease slowed her and eventually brought her career with Life to a halt in 1957. She died in 1971.

George Eastman House has all of her books and those about her. Time-Life Picture Collection in New York preserves her negatives. The largest collection of her work is held by Syracuse University. Other large collections are held in the Cleveland Public Library, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Library of Congress and the Museum of Modern Art. In two separate books, Vicki Goldberg and Sean Callahan write well about her life. Farrah Fawcett portrayed her in a 1989 television movie, Double Exposure, and Candice Bergen portrayed her in the 1982 theatrical release, Gandhi. John Szarkowski, writing on his appreciation of the collection he curated at the Museum of Modern Art, termed her “one of the most famous and most successful photographers of her time,” praising “her combination of intelligence, talent, ambition and flexibility….” Said Bourke-White, “Work is something you can count on, a trusted lifelong friend, who never deserts you.”

Anthony Bannon is the seventh director of George Eastman House, the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York.

It was in the year 1923 when Weston came into what would be his own. He had been to New York in 1922 to visit the aging guru, Alfred Stieglitz, and received approval for his new work, which was a tough-minded, tectonically articulate appreciation of the Armco Steel Mills in Middletown, Ohio. So it was in 1923 when Weston left his wife and children to travel with his lover, Tina Modotti, to Mexico, where they remained for the next three years. He also was leaving behind his old way of working, abandoning the soft focus, restrained gray scale of pictorial imagery for a more declarative modernism. This also was a vital period in Mexico, a revolutionary time for the arts and culture, with great humanist expression from Diego Rivera, Jose Clemente Orozco, David Alfaro Siqueiros, Frida Kahlo, and Miguel and Rose Covarrubius. In 1926, Weston finally returned to family and home in California; it was his 40th year. In 1928, he opened a San Francisco studio with his son Brett, and then moved to Carmel, where he remained until his death in 1958. 

Weston was born in 1886 in Highland Park, Illinois, near Chicago, where he grew up. He began to photograph at the age of 16 after receiving a Kodak Bull’s Eye #2 camera as a birthday present from his father. His first photographs captured the parks of Chicago, where he lived at the time. An indication of how seriously he took this beginning is his commemoration of his 50th anniversary in photography in 1952 with a special portfolio.

In 1906, Weston photographed professionally in Chicago and California; he attended the Illinois College of Photography in 1908. He worked in California as a door-to-door portrait photographer or as a studio printer. He married Flora Chandler in 1909, a wealthy woman seven years his senior; her father was successful in real estate and later became publisher of the Los Angeles Times. Edward and Flora quickly had four sons, Chandler (1910), Brett (1911), Neal (1914) and Cole (1919). Between 1911 and 1922, he operated his own portrait studio and made pictorial salon images, successfully entering international competitions and exhibitions. With many, Weston perceived the shifting tenor of culture at the end of World War I. The case for fine art photography had been won; it was a time to see more clearly and understand more directly. Photography, rather than trying to be richly connotative, should depict “the very substance and quintessence of the thing itself,” Weston declared. Through the 1930s, Weston enjoyed publication and significant exhibition, work with the WPA Federal Arts Project in New Mexico and California; and in 1937, the first Guggenheim Award made for photography. In 1938, Weston married Charis Wilson, with whom he had lived and photographed since 1934. She is the model for much of his work during this period, and together they published two books, The Cats of Wildcat Hill and California and the West. They were divorced in 1946.   Weston was a founding member of Group f.64, which included California-based artists Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham and Willard Van Dyke. Suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Weston ceased exposing photographs in 1948. His sons Brett, then Cole, took over printing his work for him. In 1955, Brett took on a project to make eight prints each of 1,000 negatives Edward selected. These were called the “project prints,” and about 800 negatives were realized. He died on January 1, 1958, in Carmel. 

George Eastman House holds more than 250 prints by Edward Weston, including a collection of personal images he made with Tina Modotti in Mexico. Gustavo Lozano, an Andrew Mellon Fellow in the advanced residency program at George Eastman House, has been studying the Museum’s Weston holdings. He reports that during his formative years in the 1910s and early ’20s, Weston’s photographic technique was influenced by the dominant Pictorialist aesthetic of the moment. His photographs from that period were printed by contact on matte platinum, palladium or gelatin silver paper. Later starting around 1922, Weston progressively abandoned his romantic, diffused aesthetic and shifted towards a more objective form. He began using sharper lenses, a large format camera with sharp focus in every plane and printed (still by contact) on smooth, glossy gelatin silver paper without retouching. Lozano, formerly the photography conservator at the National Library of Anthropology and History in Mexico, observed that Weston’s lenses were a very expensive anastigmat and several soft focus, among them a Wollensak Verito and a Graf Variable. George Eastman House has in its collection a Rapid Universal Lens (Bausch & Lomb Optical Company, Rochester, New York) inscribed, “To Brett – Dad ’37.” Weston made use of a 3¼ x 4¼ Graflex camera, a 4 x 5 RB Auto-Graflex and an 8 x 10 Eastman View No. 2D. 

The inscriptions in Weston’s prints changed over time, Lozano notes. In his prints from his early works until the ’20s, Weston signed in full, dated and inscribed his prints with pencil below the photograph and sometimes along the bottom edge on the mount. In his late works and particularly in his last two big projects, the “50th Anniversary Catalog” and the “Prints Project,” the full signature in script is transformed into the printed initials “EW” and the date, and the title was no longer included.  The Weston legacy has been that of carefully rendered, finely printed work without complex manipulation. Weston’s style was to use simple materials very well. It is an axiom that has sustained his regard into our time.

Anthony Bannon is the seventh director of George Eastman House, the International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, New York.

At the time of this interview, The Jewish Museum in New York City is presenting Isaac Bashevis Singer and the Lower East Side: Photographs by Bruce Davidson.
Spanning the years 1957 to 1990, the exhibition features 40 intimate photographs of Singer, the revered Yiddish author, as well as residents of the Lower East Side Jewish community, including visitors to the Garden Cafeteria in that location. Could you tell us a little about your relationship to both Isaac Bashevis Singer and the world of the Lower East Side?
Isaac Bashevis Singer lived in our building here in New York on the fifth floor. I had photographed him years before on a magazine assignment. We just became neighbors. Also, I was interested in trying to find out about his world because that was the world of my grandfather. I wanted to find continuity. My grandfather came to the United States from Poland as a boy of 14. He learned English, became a tailor, and had a very good business. He went from being a tailor into manufacturing with his older son Leonard and Leonard’s wife Ruth, and that company is very large now.

I was born in 1933 and grew up in Oak Park, Illinois. My mother was a single parent. She was working in a torpedo factory during World War II. My brother and I could really fend for ourselves. We were very self-sufficient. We learned to cook. We learned to clean. We learned to meet our mother on time at the bus stop and carry home very heavy packages of groceries. My younger brother became an eminent scientist. I became a photographer. That was all part of being with my grandfather. For a while we lived with my grandfather in the home my mother was raised in. I began to sense there was something strange about my grandfather, there was some secret. There was something he left behind and he never really talked to us about it.
I was the first son in our family at that time to be Bar Mitzvahed. Our synagogue was a small clubhouse synagogue. I mean it was not a synagogue at all; it was a clubhouse with a small congregation. While I was reciting the Hav Torah during my Bar Mitzvah, I could see a box that I knew would be a camera on the rabbi’s desk. During the 1940s, cameras were scarce. Film was scarce. I had been taking pictures since the age of 10, and was very excited about receiving my first good camera and two rolls of film.

I was taking pictures and my grandmother emptied out a closet in the basement where she stored bottles of jelly. I began developing and making small contact prints in it. I even wrote on the outside of the jelly closet — I mean, it was small; I could barely fit in it — but I wrote “Bruce’s Photo Shop.”

You know, there is a similarity between photographing and tailoring. You learn to make the pockets straight, and actually you have the persona of the person you are fixing the jacket for. The persona is definitely there. It’s craft. And photography has craft also. So my grandfather sewed buttons and I sewed photographs. So I would say that entering the world of Singer and the Lower East Side was really entering the world of my grandfather, but I am in no way an observant Jew.

As a Midwesterner transplanted to New York, you have demonstrated your great love of the city and its inhabitants in many series of photographs. Could you expand on your feelings about New York and how the city inspires you?
The town of Oak Park was a very small community. It was the home of Frank Lloyd Wright and Ernest Hemingway. I have said that I am not a practicing Jew, but I am in the sense that wherever I photograph in New York — or wherever I photograph anywhere — it becomes to me a spiritual space in that I think there is a solemn responsibility when you have a camera.
Although I don’t read the Torah, I do read the Torah of life, and my own personal Torah, so it wasn’t a big deal to leave Illinois to come East, to go to school, and to explore New York. My very first day in New York — my mother had remarried and we were staying at the Plaza Hotel — I began to explore. I went outside the hotel and I was photographing the pigeons and people with my Rolleiflex. My mother or my stepfather came out and said, “You’re using up all your film.” I think New York is probably the most important and the most alive city in the world. It’s the most diverse. It’s the most difficult. It’s the most challenging.
I have found that over the years I have been able to enter worlds within worlds in the city, beginning with the Circus series, then the Brooklyn Gang, and later the Subway and Central Park, and other entities. I entered worlds within worlds and they became sacred places for me. I no longer entered a shul; I entered the sacred space of people’s lives.

You have compared the New York City subway to the Theater of the Absurd. Do you still think of it this way?
Yes, but it is also the most democratic space in the world. Anybody, rich or poor, healthy or unhealthy, rides the subway. The graffiti at the time was written all over the place and was what is called the hieroglyphics of anxiety, of anger, of frustration, of “I am invisible but my marking remains.” You know, dogs pee on a pole but graffiti artists draw their name. The dog says, “This is me. I am here.” They’re making their marking and then somebody else comes over and pees on that marking and makes a new marking; so that was the dynamic. But the subway could be excruciatingly beautiful. It could be the sexiest environment I’ve ever been in; we can’t go into details but the subway can really be sexy.

How did all this relate to the mood of the city at that time?
At that time, about 1980, the trains were running poorly. They were very unsafe, there were a lot of muggers, there was graffiti written all over the place. I think the city was in default at that time, also. It was a chaotic, neurotic, pathetic time. And I chose…the subway really chose me. I started to go into it with a camera out, with a flash. A safari hunter. In fact I fashioned myself after the tiger hunter Jim Corbett. His books were written for boys but I liked them. So I became the tiger hunter. When you hunt tigers you have to watch your back. Anyway, I had all sorts of fantasies going because that’s what the subway can be. It could become as sacred as a church pew, it could be beautiful, it could be upsetting, it could be depressing. Anything goes, and I fed on that.

You have stated that your work in the subway was an antidote to depression. How was that so?
Because the subway was more depressed than I was. And in photographing in color — I wanted the color to be vibrant — I drew a parallel between fish in the deep sea where you see no light and yet you have iridescent colors when light is shown on them. I wanted to transform the subway in some way so that from a beast I made it beautiful and when it was beautiful I made it bestial, so that anything could come to me or reflect off me and rebound in the subway. I left my imagination and awareness open to the moment. The color experience was also a human experience.

Did you find it an experience of loneliness?
Yes, I seem to be attracted to things in transition, things that are isolated, maybe alone. I gravitate to that which has a certain tension because it’s in transition. The circus was in transition from tent shows to coliseum shows, from small, intimate family circuses to large extravaganzas.

Let’s talk about your circus photographs. Historically, many artists of the 20th century, such as Pablo Picasso, Alexander Calder and Walt Kuhn, have been drawn to clowns and the circus. What do you think is the source of the appeal and how did you yourself get started with the circus?
Magnum in New York had an incredible picture librarian by the name of Sam Holmes. Sam was an amateur trapeze artist. He was the one who told me about the circus in Palisades Amusement Park in New Jersey, which was the beginning of my circus work in 1958. I was not drawn to the circus per se, but to the clown who was a dwarf.

It was the combination of attraction and repulsion that I felt standing next to him outside the circus tent that drew my attention and sustained a friendship with him. His name was Jimmy Armstrong. He was melancholy. He was sensitive, very sensitive to everything. He wasn’t depressed but he was poetic. It’s almost like he was a performance artist. Even when he was outside the tent, he was performing; he was directing the camera to what he could feel at the time. I never said, ”Jimmy, why don’t you pick up your trumpet and blow it.” I waited for him to do it. He worked hard in the circus. He was carrying two heavy buckets of water. And you know, people in the circus liked him. I have a picture in the Circus book of a roustabout giving him a massage. He didn’t have to do that. But that was the nature of the circus, too — they were a family.

They were kind of like Magnum, but with elephants. Jimmy and I had a very silent friendship. I just observed him. He allowed me to observe. He also allowed me to see things that might have been embarrassing for him, or even dangerous, like walking through a crowd of children. You know children can be quite cruel to dwarves. Where else can you find someone with the same size head as your father, but half your size? At the end of our two-month trip together I bought him a Yashica Rolleiflex-type camera that he could hold in his hand. He often said that I was his best friend, even though I wasn’t really close to him, except in the sense that I was with him all the time. What made it so compelling was that we all have a dwarf in us, and that dwarf can come out in various ways: something small and compressed as being repulsive.

The picture I took of him peeking out of the van [on the cover of this issue] is an early ”confrontational” photograph. It isn’t that other photographers hadn’t done confrontational photographs, but it was something that wasn’t usually done. In photojournalism at that time you were supposed to be the “unobserved observer.” So no one looked at the camera because the camera wasn’t “there.” Here I made the camera “there.” I think that was a very penetrating thing.

The fact that Jimmy Armstrong, the clown, allowed me that close into his soul was important to me. He was married and had children. He married a normal-sized, but short, woman named Margie. Jimmy is dead now, and Sam and I can’t seem to find Margie. Sam found out that Jimmy, during World War II, could crawl into the fuselage of the bombers to do wiring. So he joined the war effort as a dwarf. He had a lot of lives. He was a musician. He was photographed by many different photographers, including André Kertész. He was even in a movie, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) with Charlton Heston and Betty Hutton.
After I left the circus, he sent me a route card every once in a while. This was his schedule, so I knew where he would be. I would call the chief of police of a town and say, “My cousin is a dwarf in the circus. Could you get a message to him?” The chief would assume that I was a dwarf too, and he would jump into his car and run out with the message, “call me,” or whatever. Over time I lost track.

Going back to the period of your life following Yale, you were in the military from 1955 to 1957. Was there anything about that experience that relates to your photographic work?
Absolutely. In the army, I was in the Arizona desert for about a year. I used to hitchhike to Nogales, which was only 40 or 50 miles away, to photograph the bullfights. Patricia McCormick was a female bullfighter and I became somewhat friendly with her. In hitchhiking to Nogales I came upon a small town called Patagonia. It was really a railroad siding and a bar and a gas station and a post office and that was about it. There I met an old guy who was driving a Model T Ford and we became friendly. He was a miner.

Every weekend I stayed at his bunkhouse and photographed. As I look at that body of work now, it seems very whole to me and I find it amazing. It was the precursor to the Widow of Montmartre, which I made the following year, when I was transferred from Fort Huachuca, Arizona to Paris, France. There I met a French soldier who invited me to have lunch with him and his mother in Montmartre.

After lunch I was standing on the balcony with my Leica and I saw an elderly woman hobbling up the street. I took a picture. The soldier said, “Oh, that woman lives above us and in fact she knew Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir and Gauguin.” She was in her 90s in 1956, you see. She was the widow of the Impressionist painter Leon Fauchet. So the soldier introduced us and that series became the Widow of Montmartre. I lost track of that soldier for many years, but recently found him. He still lives in the same area. He’s one of the painters at the top of the hill in Montmartre.

At that point in my life I decided to show my work to Magnum Photos in Paris and to Henri Cartier-Bresson. Well, actually I had no idea of Cartier-Bresson. He was beyond reach. I left my photos at the Magnum office. They called me and said, “We would like to show your work to Cartier-Bresson.” Then I had an appointment with him, and that was the beginning of my career, and my life in photography.

Henri Cartier-Bresson is known as one of the most influential photographers of the 20th century. What was the effect of Cartier-Bresson on you and your work?
Cartier-Bresson took me under his wing. He tried to get me to read more, to reflect more, to be more disciplined. Over that year we had a professional relationship in which I occasionally showed him my work. Of course he had seen the Widow of Montmartre contact sheets. In fact, I just donated those vintage contact sheets from 1956 and about 17 prints to the Fondation Cartier-Bresson in Paris.

Cartier-Bresson is known for developing the concept of the Decisive Moment, one definition of which is the moment of stillness at the peak of action. Do you see yourself as being influenced by this idea?
Well, the concept of the Decisive Moment has never been absolutely clear to me. To me it’s the Decisive Mood, and not the moment. I think that, sure, there is a decisive moment in life in everything we do. There’s a certain timing. But it isn’t just about timing, a man jumping over a puddle.

The Decisive Moment is an internal thing. If you become decisive and you enter life in a decisive way, the moments will appear, as long as you are in tune. So what we are really talking about is a way of looking at life, a kind of balance. Sure, there’s geometry, there are moments and all that, but my photographs are more of a mood and they are cumulative, too.

You did your series on the Brooklyn Gang in 1959. It was published in Esquire Magazine that year, but it did not appear in book form — Brooklyn Gang, published by Twin Palms — until 1998. One critic has described the essay on the Brooklyn Gang as having an air of innocence about it. Do you agree with that?
Those kids, at that time, you see, were actually abandoned by everybody, the church, the community, their families. Most of them were really poor. They weren’t living on the street, but they were living in dysfunctional homes. It’s the same thing.

Anyway, they were kids and the reason that body of work has survived is that it’s about emotion. That kind of mood and tension and sexual vitality, that’s what those pictures were really about. They weren’t about war. I mean, you can’t compare those kids to the kids today who have machine guns. So there is an innocence in the photographs because it reflected the kids’ innocence, but that innocence could erupt into violence. It’s interesting that the leader of the Brooklyn Gang, Bengie, who is now 65 years old, called when I was given a large show of the Brooklyn Gang at the International Center for Photography (ICP) in New York in 1998–99. My wife and I went down together and had coffee with him in midtown, and he turned out to have had an extraordinary life. He is now a substance abuse counselor. We just returned last Sunday from his birthday party, where we saw some of the old gang members.

Perhaps we could discuss East 100th Street for a while. You photographed on that block from 1966 to 1968. The book East 100th Street was published by Harvard University Press in 1970, and was reissued in an expanded edition by St. Ann’s Press in 2003. You received the first-ever photography grant from the National Endowment of the Arts in 1966, which you used in support of the East 100th Street project. East 100th Street appeared as a solo exhibition — your second at this venue — at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1970. How did you come to be introduced to the people on East 100th Street?
Sam Holmes, the picture librarian at Magnum who told me about the circus in Palisades Amusement Park, also told me about the “worst block in Spanish Harlem.” His cousin was a minister living on the block and working with the Metro North Citizens’ Committee. So I looked up the minister and had an appointment with the Citizens’ Committee and then I photographed for two years.

Were you attempting to create collaboration between the photographer and the subject?
Yes, one of the reasons I chose to use what would be regarded as an old-fashioned view camera on a tripod, with a flash, was that I felt it dignified the act of photography. I was eye-to-eye, face-to-face with the subject. The only thing that connected me to a camera was the little cable release, but I was really looking into the eyes of my subject. The environment was also important; what surrounded them was part of the picture, too. It was part of their expression. If the wall had a picture on it or a birdcage or nothing, it said something about them.

In some of the photographs the people presented themselves in a middle class way, very dressed up. Why do you think they chose to do that?
Well, you know, people are middle class in their minds. They may not own an automobile, but they dress very elegantly on Sunday, going to church. I had an experience in which I saw some children half-naked. They just had some little panties on and they were playing on the fire escape.

I went to take that picture. The mother saw me and brought the kids in through the window. I counted the floors and went up and knocked on the door. The woman said, “You can photograph my children that way, but you must also photograph them dressed up.” So I photographed them playing on the fire escape and on Sunday I photographed the family dressed up.

Much has been made of the dark tonality of the photographs in East 100th Street. Did that tonality emerge immediately as your intention, or did it evolve over time?
When I entered a person’s home I was entering a sacred space, is the way I looked at it. It was up to the person to decide where the photograph might be made. Was it in the kitchen, in the bedroom, or in the vacant lot downstairs? Most of the time it was in the bedroom because it was a quiet space and it had artifacts or clues to their spirituality, like a cross, a picture of Jesus, a framed photograph of John F. Kennedy.

Very often these dwellings were dark. I remember a photograph I took of an elderly woman sitting on a bed with towels and rags stuck into the cracks in the window to keep out the cold air. That was an important part of the photograph, which showed her sitting alone in this dark room with only one little light bulb on the ceiling. I tried to be true to the mood, to the darkness, and through the darkness I made a light because I made an image of that person’s predicament in life. So when I printed the photographs for the book I printed them in a very strong and heavy way. In fact, I was inspired by the bronze Degas sculpture of dancers at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The bronze looked like shrapnel to me. It was dark, metallic, rich, and I followed that through as a theme in the printing of my photographs. I was highly impassioned in those days with that tonality.

Years later, when I was printing for the second edition of East 100th Street, I opened up the tonality because I was able to: the technology had improved. I had the aid of a scanner. I made the printing a little lighter. East 100th Street wasn’t just a documentation. It was a vision, a vision in which I reached into the tonality with a large format camera. I wanted that depth of field. I wanted to be able to see down to the street while someone was lying on the couch. The way the camera was used, the way the lighting was used, the way I saw things were all part of the aesthetic. The aesthetic dimension to East 100th Street combined with the sociological message.

How recently have you had contact with the people on the block?
A few years ago I received a fellowship from the Open Society to go back to photograph. When I returned I could find very few people I knew. They had moved on. You know, people move on. What happened in the 1960s was that a matrix of new schools, tutorial programs, all kinds of things, rippled all through Spanish Harlem. Metro North Association was the beginning of that self-improvement, reviving the community. The community itself was doing it. I photographed positive aspects of new schools, new housing, tutorial programs, a new park and ball field, a women’s health center, the vest pocket gardens, and the new mood and the street. I’ve donated all that work to the Union Settlement and it is on display there. Yes, Spanish Harlem has changed. It’s almost easier to get a caffe latte now than a café con leche. Some of the texture is lost, but it’s a lot safer than it was.

Obviously you maintain contact with people you have photographed over the years. Can you tell us more about that?
I do, but I don’t overdo it, because life goes on. In Time of Change, there is a picture of a woman in a shack holding a baby, made during the Selma march. I found that baby and I found the whole family recently and re-photographed them.
Their lives had changed tremendously because of the Voting Rights Act that allowed the younger children to get a better education. One of the 11 children holds a master’s degree in library science and became head legal librarian at the State Capitol in Montgomery, Alabama. Almost all of the younger children I photographed have successful lives.

You photographed the Civil Rights Movement, primarily in the American South, from 1961 to 1965. In 1962 you received a Guggenheim Fellowship in support of this project, and in 1963 the Museum of Modern Art included these historic images, among others, in a solo exhibition. The book, Time of Change, Civil Rights Photographs 1961–1965 was published by St. Ann’s Press in 2002. In that same year, the International Center for Photography presented an exhibition of Time of Change. When you were photographing these events in the early ’60s, did you find it a frightening experience?
Oh, yes, because if you made a mistake and you got into a situation that you couldn’t get out of…that almost happened to me. I photographed a Ku Klux Klan meeting, but I drove my little Volkswagen bug too close to the cross.

When they lit it, they said, “New York license plate so-and-so, you’re too close to the fire.” I knew that that was not going to be cool, to have New York license plates at a Klan meeting in Georgia. I stayed a while, took a few pictures, and then left.

Would you call the Civil Rights photographs a turning point in your life?
Well, it certainly made it possible for me to understand what I was getting into in East 100th Street. It was the prelude to East 100th Street. It was like my homework. I had borne witness to what was going on in the South and to some extent become sensitized to what was happening in the North, too. Without that background I don’t think I would have done East 100th Street the way I did.

What about your early fashion days? How did that happen?
The story I heard was that after Brooklyn Gang was published, Alex Lieberman, the creative director of Vogue Magazine, was having lunch with Cartier-Bresson. He asked Bresson if he thought the young Bruce Davidson could do fashion. Bresson’s answer was: “If he can do gangs, why can’t he do fashion? What’s the difference?”

So I did a lot of fashion for about three years. I rarely do fashion now. I came to a point in the Civil Rights Movement where I was doing fashion and also protest marches and I couldn’t equate the two things, so I gave up fashion. I’m good at fashion photography but it doesn’t give me meaning. It’s like cotton candy. It looks beautiful, but it melts in your mouth, and the sugar can rot your teeth.

During the early 1990s, you did an extensive series on Central Park here in New York, which culminated in the book Central Park, published by Aperture Press in 1995. How did that series come about?
I did a body of work for National Geographic Magazine called The Neighborhood, in which I retraced my boyhood steps in the Chicago area. After I completed that the editors asked me what else I would like to do. I said I’ll make a list of ten things. To make it an even ten, I added Central Park. We used to take the kids there and at that time it was like a dust bowl. You never knew when you were sitting with your children if there were hypodermic needles sticking them.

Then the editors said, “Oh, Central Park, that’s a good idea.” I said, “I need four seasons and I need to be in black-and-white.” They said, “Oh, no, we are a color magazine. You have to do it in color and we can give you only three seasons.” So I went out and I started photographing Central Park. I exposed 500 rolls of film. Then we had a presentation. The next morning I got a call from the editor-in-chief Bill Graves, who said, “We’re pulling the plug on this project. Think of something else.” So I said to myself, “Good, I’m free at last,” and I went back to Central Park with my Canon Cameras and I spent the next three years photographing in black-and-white.

What are you interested in photographing at present?
I’m interested in the balance of nature right now and the meaning of the vegetation that at times goes unnoticed in our lives. I just finished a large body of work called the Nature of Paris. It was shown at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie in Paris.

The exhibition opened in June of 2007 and closed in September. In Paris I think I made an homage to vegetation. In that city the monuments take over. We go to the Eiffel Tower and we don’t realize there’s a 500-year-old tree growing right next to it. When you see the pictures it will be self-evident. I’m interested in raising people’s consciousness, my own included, to the meaning and the need for green space and vegetation. When I began the project in Paris, I began by photographing some people in nature. For instance, my assistant found an elderly woman in the cemetery in Montmartre, a woman well into her 80s or 90s. There were cats standing on the tombstones, waiting for her to come to them with food. They wouldn’t just rush in. I photographed her and also lovers in the park and all that kind of stuff, and I was getting sick from it. I edited it all out, including the panoramas, even though the panoramas were successful, I thought. I edited all the 35mm pictures out. There was something I was doing with the square format that was coming through to me. In the end the whole show was nothing but the Hasselblad 2 ¼” photographs. I was able to disinvest all that other imagery, which I’d already done, into something that I hadn’t done, something that was new to me, fresh to me. And challenging. I’m looking for another city that would be the extension of Central Park and Nature of Paris. I would like to continue the concept that was born through the Paris photographs.

At what point did you become interested in selling your photographic prints through galleries?
I was too busy photographing during the 1970s to become affiliated with a gallery. I became interested in the 1980s. It was Howard Greenberg who really brought me out of the fine art world “shadows” and into the sunshine. I had my first exhibition with his gallery in New York in 2002. I felt that Howard could really embrace my work and he did. Howard is, as they say in Yiddish, meshpokha, he’s family.

He understands the work, he’s honest, he’s energetic, and he assigned me Nancy Lieberman, who is wonderful, and who manages my work for the gallery. Recently she arranged for my wife and me to go to Greece for a 75-print commemorative exhibition for the Hellenic-American Institute in Athens.

Sandra Berler in Chevy Chase, Maryland is my sister-in-law and has represented me and others for over thirty-five years. In addition to owning a fine gallery, she is an excellent art historian and writer. Recently she arranged a show of my work along with a lecture at Sidwell Friends, the well-known school in Washington, D.C. This was a very successful experience.
On the West Coast, Rose Shoshana and Laura Peterson of the Rose Gallery have mounted some of the most beautiful exhibitions I’ve ever had. They did a dye transfer color show of Subway that was amazing to see, and before that, Brooklyn Gang. They had a patron who underwrote the creation of a portfolio of Subway containing 47 very large dye transfer prints (20 x 24″) in an edition of 7. I think there are only two portfolios left.
I am now working with three people: Howard Greenberg Gallery, in New York, Rose Gallery in Santa Monica, California and the Sandra Berler Gallery in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

After 9/11, did you have a desire to photograph events here in New York City?
Well, I went down a night or two to 9/11 to photograph. It was very difficult to get permission to work. I had sent a whole portfolio of photographs — not of 9/11 — to Hillary Clinton, but it never got to her.

The FBI just X-rayed things and kept them, so I got those prints back a year later. So I didn’t have permission to get down there, but I knew someone who operated a building nearby and they were housing police overnight. He said the captain would be willing to take me around for a while at night, but that was all I could get.

In my slide presentation I have a photograph of the Twin Towers at night with the Statue of Liberty before 9/11. It’s a photograph that can be taken only with a 1700mm telephoto lens. There are only two in the world. I borrowed it from Canon. My wife did the scouting. She found a pier that jutted out a quarter of a mile into the bay.

It’s a Kodachrome picture of the World Trade Center at night, lit by the office lights in the windows. When I took it I thought, oh, yeah, this is a perfect symbol of consumerism, materialism, all of that. But after 9/11 it became a memorial image, like two candles set on the altar of life and death. Esquire Magazine gave me an assignment to photograph some aspect of America after 9/11. I just didn’t feel comfortable going someplace like the Grand Canyon, so I went to Katz’s Delicatessen. I spent a month at Katz’s making photographs of people eating pastrami, because I wrote, “Pastrami and Peace Go Together.” You feel very peaceful when you are digesting pastrami. I felt that freedom was about being able to photograph the impossible or the vulgar or whatever, or simply people enjoying themselves.

What projects are you involved with at present?
I still do some editorial photography. In fact, I just did a really interesting project with CareOregon, a private healthcare company that asked me to photograph a number of their members. These are people who are very, very sick. They are in their homes, not in the hospital. CareOregon made two beautiful exhibitions of the work, one at their headquarters in Portland and one in the Department of Human Services Building in Salem. Legislators got the chance to see people who really need care, and who are having good care right now through CareOregon. There were testimonials that were heart-wrenching.

You’ve mentioned in interviews being influenced by W. Eugene Smith and Robert Frank and have said, “Cartier-Bresson was Bach, Smith was Beethoven, and Frank was Claude Debussy. They’re all in my DNA.”
Well, definitely Smith was an influence because his photographic essays published in Life were very powerful. To some extent I was influenced by Robert Frank, but I moved away from him completely when I did East 100th Street.

Do you have any final statements to make about your work?
I would say I work out of a state of mind. When I’m photographing the dwarf in the circus, I’m confronting myself as a giant compared to this dwarf, but I’m not a giant compared to other people who might be a foot taller than I am.

So then I confront another reality; I’m in another state of mind. Even in the Civil Rights Movement I’m erasing my own heritage and the town I grew up in. We didn’t have any social experience with black people at all. So I’m learning about that oppression as I go deeper into the Civil Rights Movement. And East 100th Street is another frame of mind. Then I work on that. I don’t read an article in The New York Times and think, well, that’s a good idea, I’ll work on that. No, my work is very personal. It’s a personal barometer of my life, a voyage of consciousness that is my life’s work. Each one is different. My wife says, “You always start with zero, you erase your clichés,” as I did in Paris. You’re only seeing what I ended with, what I felt the thing is. So there’s a psychological, there’s a visual, there’s a contemporary, there’s an artistic element. I, personally, have been printing my body of work during January and February for the last two or three years, and I’ve accumulated about 1,200 prints in that time. I’m doing it because it needs to be done. One of my publishers, Gerhard Steidl, who does beautiful, highest-quality work, and who published England/Scotland 1960 in 2005 and Circus in 2007, is talking about publishing a four or five volume set of books of my life’s work. That would be great, if it happens. I would also like to give my wife Emily credit for her keen intelligence, visual acuity and inspiration through all these years that we have lived and worked and raised our children together.

Jain Kelly was the assistant director of The Witkin Gallery in New York City from 1971-78. She has written numerous articles on various aspects of photography and is a fine-art photography consultant to collectors. Her email is [email protected].

Lawrence Schiller was one of those photographers whose name may have been forgotten, but whose photographs have not. Beginning last year a touring exhibition of his work has been drawing very large audiences in Beijing, Hong Kong, Salzburg, Berlin, London, and Sofia, Bulgaria. Indeed, in Bulgaria over 16,000 people lined up to see Marilyn Monroe and America in the 1960s, a paid-admission exhibition.

What could account for such an astounding turnout even for photographs of Marilyn? Schiller — as amazed as anyone else — wanted to know, and so he conducted a survey during the last 60 days of the show’s run to find out. “The response was very interesting,” says Schiller. “The demographics said they knew about the events in America in the ’60s, but had never seen images of them. They’d heard of [LSD guru] Timothy Leary, but [had] never seen a photo. [JFK assassin Lee Harvey] Oswald, but not a photo. The socialist government had controlled the media in those years. Same in China. They’d never seen that image of Oswald’s gun. They’d heard about the acid generation, but had never seen photos of [On The Road author] Jack Kerouac and people like that. So [the exhibition] wound up being bigger than we’d ever imagined.”

And the success Schiller’s images are enjoying with collectors matches the success the exhibition has enjoyed with the public. The relationship isn’t accidental. Schiller had commercial success in mind from the beginning. Schooled in business by his father from an early age (“I was behind the retail counter from the time I was maybe 9 or 10 years old”), Schiller could always see how to turn photographs into money, “and that may have worked against me being a photographer,” he says. Certainly, it set the stage for some criticism over the years from fellow photographers less commercially minded (and thus less commercially successful) than Schiller.

A little criticism hasn’t stopped or even slowed Schiller in a career that began in photojournalism but evolved into producing and directing motion pictures for television (five Emmy-winning) and writing and publishing many well-known best sellers (American Tragedy, on the O. J. Simpson trial, and Perfect Murder, Perfect Town, on the Jon-Benet Ramsey case). Along this colorful path, Schiller’s knack for making connections and making deals also ended up rescuing W. Eugene Smith, one of the least commercially minded photographers of that era, from a hospital in Japan and making the deal that finally brought Smith’s classic Minamata (1973) into print.

Schiller led such a varied, interesting, and successful life as a photojournalist, it’s hard to know where to start in filling in the background. Jacob Deschin called him “a pro at sixteen” in US Camera back in 1953 when Schiller was still in high school. He was winning awards right and left. He wrote a chapter on lighting for the Graphic-Graflex Photography book, had photos published in The Saturday Evening Post and LIFE, and shot his first playmate for Playboy in 1958. (He would, incidentally, go on to photograph Paula Kelly for Playboy in 1969, the first playmate to have her pubic hair escape the previously ubiquitous editorial airbrush.) Schiller’s photo of Nixon losing to John F. Kennedy won the National Press Photographers Association “Best Storytelling Photo” award in 1961. Two years later, it would be his photo of a Dallas policeman holding Lee Harvey Oswald’s rifle above his head in a media-crowded hallway that would forever nail that moment from that awful time in the minds and memories of millions.

It was two hours spent shooting on a Hollywood sound stage in 1962, however, that has pulled Schiller’s photographic career back into view. On that day he was one of three still photographers on the set of Marilyn Monroe’s last movie, Something’s Got to Give, the day she famously shed a flesh-colored bathing suit and swam naked for the cameras. The iconic photos of Marilyn peeking over the edge of the pool and toweling off beside it are Schiller’s.

One of the three photographers there that day worked for the studio; to the other, William Reed Woodfield, Schiller said: “Bill, two sets of photos will just drive down the price. One set, and we control the market for these pictures.” They combined their efforts and captured worldwide sales. Marilyn, too, had a good head for business, says Schiller. She later approved his images from this shoot, cutting up negatives she didn’t like with scissors.

The day before her death, Schiller dropped by Monroe’s home to discuss a planned photo shoot for Playboy. “She was out in the garden pulling weeds,” Schiller recalls. The next morning a phone call told him she was dead. Schiller’s image of DiMaggio at Marilyn’s funeral might have been the end of Schiller’s Marilyn story, but there were to be two other chapters, including the current interest in all of his photographic work from forty years ago. The first of these additional chapters came along ten years later: Schiller, a natural-born storyteller recalls it this way: “The way the whole thing started was with a gallery called David Stuart on La Brea in LA, and David [who usually specialized in ceramics] called John Bryson who had photographed Marilyn a lot and said the pottery business is a little slow: I want to get some foot traffic; would you like to have a show of your Marilyn photos in my gallery? Bryson said to him, ‘Well, if you really want to have an exhibition, you should do it with all LA photographers. You should call Larry Schiller and maybe Doug Kirkland.’

“So we all had a lunch together, and I said at the lunch ‘This is stupid: if you want to do it right, then we should get 24 photographers because the minute we do it somebody else is going to do it in New York. So what about Bert Stern, what about Avedon, what about Andrea de Dienes?’ So Dave Stuart said, ‘Do you think you can get everybody together?’ And I said, ‘Yeah.’ So we made a deal where my company would own a third, the photographers would own a third, and we would eventually find a writer, and from the very beginning we conceived it as an exhibit from which a book would come out of it.

“Well when we opened the exhibit at the David Stuart Gallery people were lined up 10 blocks long. That’s thousands of people headed to a little gallery, 20 by 28 feet.”

But the deal wasn’t fully done, though Schiller was already designing the book. With the press clippings and the book dummy in hand, he flew to New York to find a publisher. He went first to Random House. Schiller continues: “…[A]nd they wanted a certain writer to write it, and I didn’t like that writer. I said, ‘That writer’s never written an original word.’ I said, ‘This book needs controversy.’ They said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said, ‘This book is going to have the cover of Time and the cover of LIFE magazine the same week!’ And they said, ‘Come on Larry let’s talk about something else.’ So I walked out: they gave up the book.

“And then Harold Roth at Grosset & Dunlap called me at my hotel and said, ‘I hear your Marilyn book is available.’ I said. ‘Yes, it is.’ And he says, ‘Well, we publish Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys, and I said, ‘Well I don’t know if you are going to want to publish Marilyn Monroe with no clothes on.’ And he says, ‘Well, we’re trying to change the image of this company.’ So we meet in his office, and he says, ‘How much do you want for the book?’ And I say, ‘I want $150,000 (remember this was 1971). I want $50,000 to split up with the photographers, $50,000 for myself, and $50,000 for a writer.’ And he says, ‘Who do you want to write the book?’ and I said, ‘Get me Gloria Steinem or get me Norman Mailer.’ They made a call and got me Mailer.” 

Following the success of the book and the exhibition, Mailer and Schiller went on to collaborate on The Executioner’s Song (the Pulitzer Prize-winning book about murderer Gary Gilmore and the movie version which won two Emmy Awards), Oswald’s Tale (about Lee Harvey Oswald), and The Faith of Graffiti (photographs of New York graffiti art by Jon Naar and Mervyn Kurlansky). In a sense, the collaborations continue: In 2008 Schiller became Senior Advisor to the Norman Mailer Estate and currently serves on the board of the Norman Mailer Writers Colony. 

The last and current chapter in the story of Schiller’s Marilyn photos came about ironically because of Schiller’s current project having to do with contemporary art in China. Schiller seems always to have had a project. By the time of the Marilyn book in 1972, he had already begun to move into producing and directing movies and turning interviews with high-profile crime figures into best-selling books. The assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy, he recounts, fixed his long-standing interest in antisocial behavior. After watching people drop acid at Canter’s Delicatessen in Los Angeles, he basically shamed LIFE into running a major photo essay on LSD when no one really wanted to touch the story. Not surprisingly, Schiller went on to publish those photographs as a book.

Through the movies, Schiller has made a lot of money over the years, and the movies themselves taught him how to do it at an early age. Schiller recalls: “When I was about 16 years old, I was watching a show in the mid ’50s where they talked about Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz and how all their shows were owned by RKO pictures. But they had kept the ownership to the kinescopes, and the kinescopes were like a negative the show said. So every time the studio wanted to make more prints of the shows, they had to come back to Lucy and Desi, and they charged money to print from the kinescopes, and that’s how they became wealthy. And that stuck in my mind: the word kinescope and the word negative. 

From that day on I would take less money for my photos, and I would retain the rights.” Schiller’s love for still photography never really went away. Indeed, still work led him into movies. As special still photographer on Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), he ended up editing the still collage in the movie. He’d go on to create others for Lady Sings the Blues (1971). Along the way, he produced and directed Double Exposure: The Story of Margaret Bourke-White, based on Vicki Goldberg’s much praised biography. 

Schiller had wanted Glenn Close for the movie, but Ted Turner thought Farrah Fawcett would bring higher ratings, so he recalls the project with mixed emotions. Schiller looks on the current resurgence of interest in his photojournalism with a kind of joyful amazement. For him it’s a happy by-product of being a good host. But let Schiller tell the story: “It came about by pure coincidence. What happened was that in 2004 the Chinese government through CCTV asked to license some 30 films I’d had made for Court TV on Dr. Henry Lee, the criminologist from the OJ days. Part of the deal was a trip to China. There I discovered avant-garde Chinese art. I was probably one of the last to ‘discover’ it, but there you go.

“Through that discovery, I met a lot of important art collectors, and one of them was having dinner in my home. Between dinner and dessert, I showed him through a building behind my home that holds my files, my offices and so on. In the office there were a bunch of boxes with all my photos from the 1960s being prepared to go to the Harry Ransom Center in Texas; that’s where my archive is going.

“So this collector begins asking, ‘Who took that picture? I know that picture.’ I say, ‘I did when I was 26’ and so on. We got to the third picture and he says ‘Could I have that one? Would you sign it for me?’ I say ‘Well, you know I don’t really sign pictures; all this stuff went into boxes in the ’70s, and we’re just trying to figure out what’s in here.’ So I signed the photo and gave it to him, and we went back into the house and had dessert. 

“He says ‘You know photographers all over the world are doing signed, limited editions. If you shot these pictures of Marilyn Monroe, why aren’t you doing that?’ I said, ‘I don’t have time to do that; I got Bert Stern started doing that. When I did the Marilyn book with Mailer that was the beginning of it all.’ So he says, ‘Why don’t you do it?’ I tell him again, ‘I don’t have the time to do it.’ He says, ‘I’ll put up the money; we’ll find somebody to do it. What would it cost?’ So the short and long of it is we finally figured it would cost around $800,000. And he says, ‘I want 25% ownership. I’ll have the money in your bank tomorrow.’ And he did.”

Unlike Bert Stern, who Schiller thinks made a mistake in releasing so many of his images of Marilyn, Schiller has authorized only a handful. Printed in silver gelatin and platinum, the editions are doing very well. Are the photos art? Schiller makes no such claim. “It’s the museums and the collectors who see the pictures as art,” says Schiller. “I don’t see myself as an artist. Eugene Smith was a great artist and Danny Lyon’s work had an art feel to it, and Ernst Haas and Margaret-Bourke White — her black-and-white images all had an art feel to them — but mine I always felt were more like a sponge, if you know what I’m saying. I was preserving what was in front of me.

“There’s a difference,” says Schiller, “between art and imagery that sells (and often for a lot of money), but still may not be art. I really don’t know where my images kind of fit. They’re selling but are they selling because they’re art or because they’re history? There are a few images of mine, like Buster Keaton, which people consider art, or James Earl Jones and images like that, but I think the greater number of my pictures are selling because they are the iconic images of history.” 

As the resurgence of interest in Schiller’s images affirms, photos from the past accrue different values as time moves on. Whether as art or history, we’re glad to have the pictures.

James Rhem is the author of Ralph Eugene Meatyard: The Family Album of Lucybelle Crater & Other Figurative Photographs (ISBN 978-1891024290) and the Phaidon 55 Series on Aaron Siskind (ISBN 978-0714841519). He is also the Executive Editor of the National Teaching and Learning Forum out of Madison, WI. For more information regarding his books or his work, please contact James at [email protected].

The art world has long been dominated by traditional mediums like painting, sculpture, and printmaking. However, in recent years, a new medium has emerged that is shaking up the art world: digital art, specifically Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) in fine art photography.

Fine art photography has traditionally been seen as a niche within the larger art world, but NFTs are allowing photographers to create unique digital assets that can be bought and sold like traditional art pieces. In this article, we’ll explore the intersection of NFTs and fine art photography, and how this emerging trend is changing the way we think about photography as an art form.

NFTs and Fine Art Photography

So, what exactly is an NFT, and how does it apply to fine art photography? Put simply, an NFT is a unique digital asset that is stored on a blockchain. This digital asset can be anything from a piece of digital art to a video game item, or in this case, a fine art photograph.

When a photographer creates an NFT of their work, they are essentially minting a digital asset that is unique and one-of-a-kind. This means that the NFT holder owns the original digital asset, even if the photograph can be easily reproduced. In other words, the NFT acts as a certificate of authenticity for the photograph.

This is a game-changer for fine art photography. Historically, the value of a photograph was largely determined by its physical characteristics, such as the quality of the paper or the size of the print. However, with NFTs, the value of a photograph can be based on its uniqueness, scarcity, and provenance.

Creating an NFT of a fine art photograph can also open up new revenue streams for photographers. They can sell the NFT of their work directly to collectors, who can then resell the NFT to other buyers. In addition, photographers can sell prints of their photographs alongside the NFT, offering collectors both a physical and digital version of the same work.

Examples of NFT Fine Art Photography

There have been several notable examples of fine art photography being sold as NFTs, which has demonstrated the potential for this emerging trend to revolutionize the art world.

One of the most high-profile examples of NFT fine art photography is Trevor Jones’ “Piccadilly Circus”. This photograph, which depicts London’s iconic Piccadilly Circus at night, was sold as an NFT in February 2021 for over $100,000. The NFT was purchased by an anonymous buyer, who now owns the original digital asset of the photograph, making it a one-of-a-kind piece.

In November, 2021 Alyson and Courtney Aliano’s Twin Flames #49 fetched a staggering 871 ETH, earning it the fifth spot among the most expensive photographs ever sold. This puts the Alianos in the same league as iconic artists such as Andreas Gursky, Richard Prince, and Cindy Sherman, solidifying their place in the annals of art history.These sales demonstrate the potential for NFTs to unlock new revenue streams for photographers and provide a unique investment opportunity for collectors.

Beyond individual photographs, some artists are using NFTs to create entire collections of digital art. For example, Mad Dog Jones recently released a collection of NFTs called “REPLICATOR,” which features a series of digital sculptures and animations that explore themes of consumerism and mass production. The collection sold out in just a few hours, demonstrating the appetite for digital art that is sold as NFTs.

While these examples are just the beginning of what is possible with NFTs in fine art photography, they represent a significant shift in how we think about the value of digital art. By creating unique digital assets that are one-of-a-kind and cannot be replicated, NFTs are allowing photographers to monetize their work in new ways and reach a wider audience of collectors and investors.

Challenges and Criticisms

While NFTs offer many benefits to fine art photography, they are not without their challenges and criticisms. One of the main criticisms of NFTs is their environmental impact. Creating an NFT requires a significant amount of energy, which can contribute to the carbon footprint of the digital art world.

In addition, there are concerns about the speculative nature of NFTs. Some critics argue that the high prices of NFTs are driven more by hype than by the value of the underlying artwork. This has led to fears of a NFT bubble that could burst, leaving buyers with worthless digital assets.

Despite these criticisms, the use of NFTs in fine art photography shows no signs of slowing down. As more photographers experiment with this new medium, we are likely to see even more innovative uses of NFTs

Saul Leiter, the ambidextrous artist, thrived in the silence of his studio as much as he did in the cacophony of New York City’s streets. His art is a testament to his ceaseless exploration of the medium, capturing the city’s endless rhythm for over six decades. Akin to a visual symphony, the exhibition manifests Leiter’s ability to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary.

The artist’s black and white photography is a study in chiaroscuro, with varying intensities of black that shimmer on the surface. Occasionally, this monochromatic narrative is punctuated by a burst of hyper-saturated color, a testament to Leiter’s ability to discern and articulate visual surprises in the urban landscape.

Leiter’s works possess an innate sense of balance, exactitude, and humility. His subjects are captured in their purest essence, often revealing more in their concealment. These images are imbued with a sense of the sublime, where everyday objects and scenes are transformed into enigmatic moments, inviting viewers to engage in a dialogue with the unseen and the overlooked.

The exhibition’s curatorial brilliance lies in the seamless convergence of Leiter’s photographs, drawings, and paintings. Most of these works have never been published before, offering a fresh perspective into the artist’s perception of the world. The interplay of different artistic languages rub against each other, speaking to us, telling us stories, and unraveling enigmas that these fragments of an unfinished world contain.

The show is a celebration of imperfection, in line with Leiter’s belief in the importance of flaws. It takes us on a journey through time, showing us that despite the darkness that may prevail in the world, these fragments of art endure, intact, and continue to resonate with audiences, both visually and emotionally.

“Fragments of an Unfinished World” offers a much-needed exploration into Saul Leiter’s artistic universe. It is a show that requires, and indeed rewards, just a little more attention. As one delves deeper, the images transform from mere fragments to grand narratives, each holding a mirror to Leiter’s vision of the world, making it one of the most important exhibitions of the year.

Steve McCurry’s career was launched in 1979 when he crossed the Pakistan border into Afghanistan shortly before the Russian invasion. One of only a handful of photographers who had entered the country to document the countrywide insurgency against the Afghan government, he returned with rolls of film hidden in his clothing. As the world began to understand the importance of the emerging conflict in the region, his photographs were in demand and he received offers of assignments from Time Magazine and National Geographic. His coverage of the events in Afghanistanwon the Robert Capa Gold Medal for Best Photographic Reporting from Abroad in 1980. 

Although McCurry is best known for his stories for National Geographic, he has published in many other major magazines and newspapers, including LIFE, Newsweek, Paris MATCH, Der Spiegel,and The New York Times. The National Press Photographers Association named him Magazine Photographer of the Year in 1984. He received four first prizes in the World Press Photo Contest in 1985 and became a member of Magnum Photos in 1986. McCurry is a two-time recipient of the Overseas Press Club’s Oliver Rebbot Memorial Award. In 2002, he was given a Special Recognition Award by the United Nations International Photographic Council in acknowledgement of ceaseless devotion and outstanding achievement in photography.

What was your childhood and youth like?

I was born in 1950 and grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia. As a kid, I loved sports and played in the woods near our house. I had two older sisters, Jean and Bonnie. My father was an electrical engineer. My mother died when I was eight years old. After her death, my father was overwhelmed by taking care of three active children. I had a lot of energy and was always a bit of a wild child. He thought that the regimen of boarding school would be helpful in terms of discipline and character building. So he sent me to boarding school when I was twelve, which was one of the dark periods in my life. Boarding school was tedious and stifling and just not a lot of fun; I tried to escape from that at the first possible chance and was able to return home after a year. After high school I went to live and travel in Europe and the Middle East for a year. That was important because it really got me interested in exploring the rest of the world. I decided that whatever I did in the future, traveling the world would be part of my life. 

I worked odd jobs in Stockholm and in Amsterdam. I worked on a kibbutz in Israel. Life on the kibbutz was fascinating. We worked for two hours before breakfast and then late into the day, but I was learning about the value of community, hard work, and cooperation. I also went through Turkey, Bulgaria, and Yugoslavia.

At what point did you start college and where did you go?

After traveling in Europe for more than a year I went to college when I was twenty. I went to Penn State University.

Is that where you got interested in photography?

While I was in college, I traveled during my summer vacations, going to Central America and to Africa. I financed these travels by working. I hitchhiked through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, and Panama. I was photographing along the way and then came back to Pennsylvania.

My father had always been interested in photography. He had an old Argus C-3 35-mm camera and a box of slides he had taken when he was a young man. 

In my second year of college I took a cinematography course, and in my third year I took a fine-art photography course. I didn’t even own a camera, but the department had cameras we could borrow. We had a couple self-assigned projects: portraits and our own independent study. I came up with an idea of shooting windows and doors. During that time, I started doing assignments for the college newspaper. I was also studying photographers like Diane Arbus, Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and André Kertész. Probably my first approach to photography was influenced by these photographers. I was always drawn to street photography.

How did you make the leap into professional photography?

When I graduated I started making pictures for a newspaper outside of Philadelphia and selling them for $5 a picture. Eventually I got a staff job on this newspaper and I did that for about two-and-a-half years. I started looking for other challenges. I also wanted to travel. I started investigating my options. I took a few workshops — one with photographer Elliott Erwitt, one with Ernst Haas, and one with picture editor, John Morris — and decided I wanted to freelance. I saved my money and started looking around for small magazines that couldn’t afford to send me to a place but that would buy a story for a few hundred dollars. That would be enough to keep me going. India seemed like a good choice because so many great photographers had worked there. I’d already been to Africa and Latin America, so I thought, OK, let me go to India for six or seven weeks. I went with a friend who is a photographer and writer. We knew we could live on a few dollars a day and have some great experiences. 

I’d been in India for two weeks when I got amoebic dysentery. Within the same couple of days I came across a rabid dog and had to get rabies shots. That was back when you had to get a series of shots in the stomach. It was really painful and I was delirious. What had originally been a six-week trip to India turned into two years. During those two years I bounced around India, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Thailand, getting to know the region.

Up until then I had been shooting in black-and-white but switched to Kodachrome overnight. It was back in the days when it was difficult getting Kodachrome processed in India, so I had to send it back to the States. I had someone look at it to make sure the camera was working and all that, but I was never actually able to see my own pictures for about a year and three months.

Most people in the West weren’t paying much attention to the region then. But wasn’t it just becoming a political hot spot?

There was a civil war just beginning in Afghanistan. In June of 1979, I met some refugees in a cheap hotel in Chitral, Pakistan, who invited me to go into Afghanistan to photograph and see the situation. When they came for me the next morning, I was having second thoughts, but I wanted to honor my commitment so I went ahead. They referred to themselves as Mujahideen. They were part of the uprising that was turning into a civil war. They were fighting against the newly installed communist government. The Afghan army was punishing them in turn by bombing and actually decimating whole villages. At this point, there wasn’t much information or interest about the situation in Afghanistan. But when the Soviets invaded later that year, it became a huge, international story.

Why were the Soviets so concerned about Afghanistan?

The Afghans’ resistance to the Afghan government was becoming strong and building day by day. The Soviets became nervous that unless they propped up the fledgling Communist government they would lose a client state. 

The Soviets decided to go in and give the government help in putting down the insurrection because it had spread throughout the country. The national government had to withdraw from whole areas because the local people had taken over. That is when the Soviets took action and moved their tanks into the country.

Did the movie Charlie Wilson’s War bear any relationship to reality?

There was a lot in the film that I identified with. The biggest and most celebrated victories of the Mujahideen were when they were able to shoot a helicopter or a jet out of the air. It was what they talked about all the time.

Eventually they got Stinger missiles that could seek and destroy Russian aircraft, which forced the planes to fly at a very high altitude. They could no longer come in low. In the beginning, they would be a couple hundred feet off the ground, sometimes as low as 300 feet. Sometimes they were so low and so close they would fill my lens making it hard to photograph them. They would swoop in at an angle and we would pray they wouldn’t see us and start strafing. For a while, they had complete control of the air. 

One night we were in a barracks asleep and they made a bombing run. The bomb landed just a few hundred feet away. There was a huge explosion and it blew out the glass and window frames into the room covering us with dust and debris. 

It was 10 o’clock at night and the room was pitch-black swirling dust and smoke and, my god, we thought we were dead.

How did you get your film out of the country?

I decided to cross into Afghanistan secretly without my passport because it was impossible to get an Afghan visa at that point. So I walked for two or three days to get to where the fighting was. After a stay of two or three weeks, I had to return to Pakistan but had to enter without an exit visa or an entry visa in my passport. In that kind of situation, the rules really don’t apply. I had a bulky camera bag and couldn’t very well hide the cameras, but I thought I could place the exposed film in strategic places on my body and keep unexposed dummy rolls in the camera bag. I hid the film I had actually shot in my clothing. I was dressed as an Afghan and I had to hope that nobody would realize I was a foreigner until I got to a certain point beyond the frontier.

I passed back and forth over the border many times over the years. I was arrested four times in Pakistan. One time I spent five days in jail. For the first few times this was all new to me and all new to the Pakistanis. From their point of view, they must have been wondering who I was. Was I a spy, a gunrunner, a drug trafficker? Maybe they called the embassy. Who knows how they check these things. As time went on, the people covering the story had sort of an unofficial permission to cross into Afghanistan without using our passports.

I have gone into Afghanistan 30 or 40 times over the years. Of course, there was always a risk. Having the right translator/fixer is the most important thing. I never told my driver in advance where I was going or how long I would be in the country. After being robbed at gunpoint a few times you develop a sort of paranoia. One time my wallet was stolen at gunpoint. Another time I was behind the wheel driving down the road and there was a group of seven armed men pretending to be manning an official checkpoint. I had been through a lot of checkpoints so I knew what a real one looked like, and I had a very bad feeling about that one. So I just sped up and took off. They started firing their guns. As we drove off, a bus came right up behind me and shielded the field of vision between those shooters and our car. I stopped at the next checkpoint, a legitimate one, five or ten miles down the road, and when the bus driver came up, he said the bus had been hit by the bullets. I knew if I had stopped they would have stolen our money and cameras at the least, and maybe killed us.

At what point did you start working for National Geographic, which published several of your most important stories?

I went into Afghanistan with the Mujahideen in June of 1979. The New York Times ran a couple of my pictures, but nobody was terribly interested in the story. When the Russians invaded it became a huge story. My pictures started being published in newspapers and magazines around the world. 

After being away for two years, I came back to the States in February of 1980. National Geographic had seen the pictures and was interested in doing a story in that region and they thought that I had access to certain areas, so they gave me an assignment to go to Pakistan to do a story on the Kalash people. I was torn between working for the news magazines with their quick turnaround and doing longer, more in-depth stories that sometimes may take months to produce and may not be published for a year or so. 

Then I proposed two stories back-to-back to National Geographic, both of which were published. One was on the monsoon and one was on a train journey across South Asia from the Khyber Pass through India to Bangladesh. I had read the book The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux while I was flat on my back with dysentery. I loved that book. I thought it would be a wonderful picture story, so I ended up photographing it for National Geographic. Paul wrote the text that we parlayed into a book called The Imperial Way.

The monsoon story was about the renewal of life. If the monsoon fails, it’s life threatening, and if there’s too much rain there’s the danger of flooding. The monsoon is an important part of the Indian psyche. I thought that story was enormously important. I had always remembered the wonderful work of Brian Brake, a Magnum photographer who had photographed the monsoon back in the early sixties.

I spent most of 1984 photographing the monsoon and the train story, and on the heels of that, there was the Afghan border story in which I photographed Afghan refugees along the Afghan/Pakistan border. So these three stories came out one after the other.

The Afghan border story is the one in which the famous picture of the Afghan girl with green eyes appeared. How did you come to make that photograph?

In 1984 I was in Pakistan, outside of Peshawar, in an Afghan refugee camp. There were tens of thousands of tents. I walked past one particular tent that was being used as a girls’ school. I looked into the tent and asked the teacher if I could take some pictures and she agreed. It’s very difficult to photograph females in Afghan culture, and I thought maybe one way to deal with the problem would be to photograph young girls, which is usually all right. 

You can photograph girls, but not grown women, with the exception of women in professional capacities like teachers and nurses. I picked out three young girls in the class, but I could see that one girl, whose name I learned years later was Sharbat Gula, had a really intense, haunted look, a penetrating gaze. She was about 12 years old. She was very shy, and I thought if I photographed the others first she would be more likely to agree because at some point she would not want to be left out.

There must have been about 15 girls in that school. They were all very young and they were doing what school children do all over the world. They were running around making noise and stirring up a lot of dust, but in that photograph for one brief moment you don’t hear the noise or all the kids running around and you don’t see all the dust. I guess she was as curious about me as I was about her because she had never met a foreigner and had never been photographed and had probably never seen a camera. So this was a new experience for her. Then, after a few moments, she just got up and walked away. She had run out of patience and her curiosity was satisfied. However, for a magical moment, all the elements had come into alignment. The background was right. The light was right. The emotion was right.

There’s a balance in the photograph. Even if you don’t know she’s an Afghan refugee, it’s clear that she’s a poor girl: she’s a little dirty, she has a hole in her shawl, but she is striking. There’s a mix of emotions and there’s a genuine quality about her. There is an ambiguity to her expression, a certain something or quality to that picture that people respond to.

Many people think that photograph has achieved the status of Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother photograph as one of the major iconic images of the 20^th century.

It is amazing to me that this picture is known all over the world. Every day we get emails from people who want to reproduce it for unlikely purposes. I got an email from Tokyo, from a man who wants to use the Afghan girl photograph on a limited-edition bottle of sake. Part of the proceeds would go to a charity. We had to decline because it wouldn’t be appropriate. It’s such a strange request, but every day we get requests from people who want her picture for a textbook or an ad or who want to contact her to send her money.

Years later you tried to find her. How did you go about that?

I had looked for her for many years to no avail. After the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States in 2001, we invaded Afghanistan and shortly afterwards I was scheduled to go over with a film crew to do a documentary. One aspect of the plan was to look for this Afghan girl, but originally that was not the only objective. We got to Pakistan to begin the documentary and we started looking for her in the same refugee camp where I had photographed her in 1984. It was scheduled to be demolished so we got there just in time. We started to come close to finding her, and suddenly the film took an entirely different turn and it became just about looking for her. We never did make it to Afghanistan.

In the refugee camp we had a lot of cooperation from the tribal elders. I think there was a certain buzz about our project, in a positive sense. We had a really wonderful fixer-translator who was very respected. He was from the same tribe. The tribal elders knew him, knew his credentials. We talked to hundreds of people in the camp where she had lived. There were rumors that she had died or been killed.

Finally one man remembered her as a girl and said, “I know where her brother lives.” That man was actually able to bring her and her husband to us from across the border in Afghanistan where she was living.  Fortunately, Sharbat Gula’s husband was completely helpful and cooperative, so we could meet her, interview her, and photograph her 17 years later, and actually help her — compensate her financially for the picture we had used for all those years. But it was kind of a shock. I had this image of her as a 12-year-old girl. And then suddenly she walks in the door and it’s not a 12-year-old girl; it’s a woman of 30. But she’s lived a very hard life. People age quickly in that harsh climate, [with a] lack of hygiene and poor diet. She looks at least twenty years older than her real age. It was a shock to see her after all those years.

Had she ever seen the photograph of herself as a girl?

No, no, she had never seen the picture. Oddly, her husband worked near a shop that had her picture in the window. He had walked past it but had never connected to it, never looked at the picture.

Sharbat Gula is illiterate. When we told her that the picture had been published all over the world, she didn’t understand. Her parents had been killed. She had lived a very sequestered life and didn’t really have any contact with the world outside of her husband and children and in-laws and maybe a few friends in the neighborhood, so she could not really understand the concept of magazines and television.

She had never seen television?

I think she had probably seen it, but only in glimpses. There was no electricity in her small town in Afghanistan. Maybe when she went to a teashop in a nearby town with her husband, there was a television off in a corner and [she] may have watched it for a few minutes.

Later, our documentary In Search of the Afghan Girl was aired, and she actually watched her story on Pakistani television, so at that time it really sank in that this was a big deal. I think it was so important to Afghans because there was a sense that she had represented all Afghan refugees and the country itself in a positive way. Afghans are very proud of that picture. They feel that it really shows courage and all those qualities of perseverance and pride and dignity. I’ve met Afghans all around Afghanistan and refugees in Washington D.C. and New York who have thanked me for the picture. Actually, Afghan Airlines used that picture on their airplane ticket coupon folder. It’s really turned out to be a good situation for her and her family. They were given an all-expense paid trip to Mecca for the Hajj, which was her life-long dream. Without this picture that would never have happened. She received compensation from National Geographic. Suddenly, based on a fleeting moment when you are 12 years old, this great thing happens to you. I don’t think her neighbors realize who she is — well, they don’t meet her for one thing — she lives a very quiet and secluded life.

How many stories have you done for National Geographic over the years and how many covers have you had?

I’ve had almost one article a year since the early ’80s. It’s great to have the cover of a magazine on the newsstands, but it’s better to have the long view. It’s more important to create a picture that survives in our consciousness and for some reason strikes a chord in our being. The amount of magazine work you do or the number of covers you have isn’t really the goal. In the end all that matters is, do we love that picture? Is it a picture we want to come back to time and time again?

One of your stories for National Geographic was on the first Gulf War in Iraq, Desert Storm, in 1991. What was the experience like to photograph that war?

Well, the story was really about the environmental impact of the hundreds of oil wells set burning in Kuwait by Saddam Hussein. I had actually gone over to that area a week or two prior to the ground offensive. Nobody knew when the ground war was going to start, but everybody knew there was going to be one. I started in Saudi Arabia photographing the oil coming up on the beaches. I joined an army unit and we went in the day the ground war began. It lasted only for about two days. It was very uneventful because there was no resistance. I spent the next three weeks photographing the damaged country of Kuwait. Not only were the oil fields on fire, but the Iraqi soldiers had also looted and vandalized everything. It was a very damaged country, but my main focus was on the environment. 

It was absolutely one of the most amazing things to witness. It was really like this enormous End of the World movie set where you have all these overturned cars, destroyed buildings, and smoke in the sky. You didn’t see anybody on the roads for miles and miles. The oil fields were completely empty but occasionally you’d see camels. The middle of the oil field was so dark with smoke that it was like night, even though it was 11 o’clock in the morning. The smoke was black, the ground was black, and the camels were black. I was trying to find a way to separate the black camels from the black smoke. Suddenly they ran in front of an area of fire and they were in silhouette, so I was able to take a couple pictures. 

The poor creatures were lost and they were caught in the middle of the conflagration. There were dead bodies all over the place. The Iraqis had fortified Kuwait, planning to hold it, so they mined the beaches. Within the first hours of the ground war, the Iraqis realized there was no chance and so they made a run for it back to Iraq. There was no water [and] no food, and hundreds of oil wells were on fire. No one knew what this meant, environmentally. Was it a catastrophic event for the whole planet? Of course all the marine life and bird life was affected, and then of course, the Gulf, where a lot of the oil comes from, was a big question. I really felt I was a witness to part of an historic event.

In your work, you have obviously faced many dangerous situations. What are some of the most memorable?

One of the scariest was a plane crash. I had hired a small, ultra-light, two-seater airplane in Yugoslavia to do aerials. The pilot flew down to the surface of the lake, very, very close — in fact so close that I told him to go up because we were about five feet from the water. If I wanted to be that close I could have hired a boat. But it was too late. The wheels got caught in the water and we couldn’t pull out. 

We went down and as soon as the fuselage and the propeller hit the water, the propeller blew apart. Then we flipped upside down in this freezing alpine lake in the middle of February and immediately began to sink. The cockpit was not enclosed. The seatbelt was sort of homemade and I hadn’t studied it and couldn’t get it off. I realized I was going to die. I guess that part of your brain concerned with self-preservation kicked in and I slid underneath the seatbelt, literally went underneath, and was able to swim to the surface. The pilot made it, but didn’t attempt to help me.

There was another airplane incident in Africa. We got lost flying from Timbuktu in Mali back to the capital of Bamako. We left in a sandstorm and started flying along the Niger River. I guess the pilot’s navigational instruments weren’t working. He literally could not find his way back to the capital. I saw this guy circling and I thought, why are we circling? He came back down through the clouds. It was getting dark and there was a huge thunderstorm right in our path. 

We were getting lower and lower and lower and then I realized we were going down. In the middle of nowhere he started to put the plane down in a field. I thought, oh, man, we’re going to hit a stone or a hole and crash. So we were bouncing along in this field alongside a big hole, and miraculously we came to a stop. We actually walked out and hired a jeep from a nearby village. We survived, but it gets you nervous.

Another time I was in India photographing the Chaturthi festival of Ganesh, the elephant god in the Hindu religion. For many days people celebrate by carrying a statue of Ganesh on their heads into the Indian Ocean. It is a sign of respect. On the final day there must be two million people taking part in this festival. I walked into the ocean to photograph as the men carrying this image of the elephant god went into the sea, and suddenly a group of boys — teenagers — ran up to me and start beating me. The water was already past my waist. Then they grabbed the camera strap and pulled it down so my head went under water; of course, then the camera was ruined. Totally destroyed. 

My assistant, who had the rest of my camera equipment, was also there. They knocked him over. Everything was instantly ruined in the saltwater. Then, after getting my cameras underwater, they started thrashing me again. I thought they were going to drown me, once they got going. There were a half-dozen boys and each one is going to take his turn and the cumulative effect is that I’m going to drown. Once that mob mentality starts rolling sometimes it’s hard to stop it.  

I had had that really bad experience with the water in Yugoslavia and as a child I had almost drowned a couple times playing in the streams in the wooded area near our house, so I had a fear of drowning. At the last minute, a man came up and intervened — saved me — called those guys off, and said I hadn’t done anything wrong. They may have feared that my presence would bring misfortune.

Why do you like working in Asia so much? 

It’s impossible to find a place that has more diversity and a more disparate cultural situation. Imagine the proximity of Afghanistan, India, and Tibet, and yet they are so vastly different. You have all this conservative Islamic culture with Pakistan and its northwest frontier. Then you have —it’s just a day away, less than a day if you’re on a good road — millions of Hindus, embedded in a very strong, ancient culture. 

Then there is a short jog up to Tibet, with its profound Buddhist culture and this incredible Himalayan landscape. I love the mountains and for me the Himalayas are the most dramatic and the most beautiful and breathtaking place I’ve ever been. Then you get down to broader Southeast Asia with Angkor Wat. 

You have a wonderful, architectural range in Southeast Asia, as well as all the different kinds of religions and faiths and practices. The Jains, the Sikhs, the Muslims. India has one of the largest Muslim populations in the world, and there’s a huge Christian population. The Parsis are very interesting, a small Zoroastrian group centered around Bombay and Gujarat. There are temples and practices and festivals that are connected to these different religions. You have the forces of China, India, Buddhism, and Islam, all converging.

The politics involve tremendous intrigue. You have Afghanistan and Pakistan and Tibet. There is a lot of upheaval and churning. When I started out the Khmer Rouge was still active in Cambodia and Burma still had 20 insurgent groups active. Bangladesh was still a new country. Tibet was coming out of the dark ages of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and Ceylon had become Sri Lanka with the Tamal Tigers. You have this dramatic weather system called the monsoon. The land is either flooding or in a drought.

Everywhere you turn there is something extraordinary happening, or terrible, or hideous, or beautiful, or sublime, or something which you have never seen before. After growing up in suburban Philadelphia, I found this to be a completely different experience.

Out of all of the different cities and countries you’ve visited throughout the years, would you be able to pick a favorite?

I guess I’d have to say my favorite countries are the Buddhist countries, whether it be Laos or Thailand or Cambodia or Bhutan or Tibet or Burma. Buddhism is endlessly fascinating — the iconography, the way the monks live. Their philosophy emphasizes compassion and non-violence. I guess Tibet is another one of my favorite places. Just to walk through those mountains and to visit the monasteries…it really speaks to me. I’m inspired to work there and to photograph there. It’s important to document this place because it’s a vanishing culture. Let’s celebrate it, let’s remember it, let’s somehow have a record of this before it’s lost forever. So many treasures of the world have been lost, so much beauty and knowledge.

The sad thing about Tibet is that the Chinese decided that they own it, so there was a struggle and an invasion and an occupation. You have over a billion Chinese population who could just overwhelm Tibet in a heartbeat. In fact they’ve already overwhelmed Tibet just in terms of sheer numbers. Take Lhasa for instance, the capital of Tibet, which is really more of a Chinese city than a Tibetan city. Probably 60–65 percent of Lhasa is Chinese now, so Tibetans are becoming strangers in their own land, second-class citizens in their own country. It’s just so sad to me to see this fragile culture in danger, in peril of being lost.

How do you approach an assignment? What research do you do beforehand?

Most of my photographic projects now involve places I’ve already been to and really experienced. With the monsoon in India, I had already been experiencing it, actually living it, for two or three years. 

I did a story recently on the Bamiyan region in Afghanistan, the home of the Hazara tribe, a Mongolian people who came to Afghanistan perhaps a thousand years ago. They are a very peaceful, long-suffering tribe, who somehow end up on the short end of the stick. I’d already spent years observing them and living among them. So, as far as research goes, I want to arrive at a place with a pretty good idea of what I’m going to do. But there’s no point, really, in spending time trying to come up with a bunch of pre-conceived ideas because you will always end up being disappointed. I usually get to a place and immerse myself in the situation and then go from there. Since I’ve been so many places I have a long list of situations and places and people that I would love to photograph. Increasingly I am going independently to photograph whatever I want. Since I’ve always been interested in photographing Afghanistan, South Asia, Tibet, and Buddhism, it’s like a continuum rather than an assignment. I might get an assignment, but it’s really adding to my body of work.

You are especially noted for the powerful use of color. How do you think about color when you’re making a picture?

I thinkthere has to be a kind of a flow and a balance not only of color but also of composition. There’s a point at which things make sense and come to rest. Pictures hopefully are about something. I think the works of art that resonate with people — the ones that are the most successful — have some emotional component, some human story that we respond to. In the statue of David by Michelangelo or in the painting of Mona Lisa by da Vinci or in many of van Gogh’s or Rembrandt’s paintings, there’s something going on.  But to get back to color, I think there’s a balance between having something completely monochromatic and having an excess of color. Often you need just two or three colors. You have to edit yourself as you shoot. 

I think black-and-white is easier because you don’t have that extra problem of color to solve. A red bucket in the background can spoil a color picture. A red bucket in a black-and-white photograph is just a gray object. Honestly, I’m not looking for color pictures most of the time. I’m looking for something interesting, a little story, some humanity. Color is secondary. I’ll recognize it when I see it, but I’m not searching for a red thing here and another red thing over there. That doesn’t interest me as much as humanity and the human condition.

Do you photograph in black-and-white at all anymore?

Actually, I’m shooting a black-and-white project right now. I’m finding it’s a lot of fun. I’m not shooting it any differently than I shoot in color, so I think a lot of the discussion about how people photograph differently in black-and-white versus color is a lot of bunk. 

Some people have a natural sense of design, a natural sense of balance, a natural sense of color. Henri Cartier-Bresson had a wonderful sense of design, of geometry, which he talked about. Well, he was a genius and he had a great gift.

Do you see a distinction between “photojournalism” and what might be called “documentary” photography?

I see myself as a documentary photographer, photographing the world as it is.

Do you think that the art world has been neglecting photojournalism and documentary photography?

I think some documentary photography is becoming more and more accepted in the fine art market. 

There are certain documentary photographs in the world that just hit on something that we all respond to; there is a universal chord that speaks to us. They become important. Documents are important, and they rise to the surface in that world of collecting and exhibitions and people want them. Some of the photographers in the past — W. Eugene Smith, Dorothea Lange, Henri Cartier-Bresson — have been a bridge to acceptance of the documentary photographer in the art world today.

Do you sell your photographic prints and do you work with art galleries?

Yes, I sell my prints through my web site and also through galleries in the U.S. and Europe. I’m a member of Magnum Photos, and we have an exhibition division. I make Cibachrome prints for sale in the fine art market. Most of the prints are 20 x 24-inches, which is my favorite size. I go up to 30 x 40-inches. That’s usually the largest size. I work with a 35mm [camera], often in low light with things that are moving; sometimes there’s a limit to how large I can make a print.

How do you find the art scene? The photography art scene, specifically?

Well, I often look at work and wonder how we will perceive this in fifty years. What is compelling about this particular picture? Where is it taking me? Sometimes it just seems like the photographer is desperate to come up with a new idea to make a mark. It looks like too much effort went into trying to make “art.” I love the work of André Kertész and Dorothea Lange — mostly black-and-white photography, actually — and Cartier-Bresson. I think Ernst Haas was a brilliant color photographer. I want to look at a picture like Diane Arbus’s photograph of a boy in Central Park with a hand grenade. That’s powerful. There’s something amazing going on in that picture. I can think of several of Garry Winogrand’s pictures that really take you somewhere. He has a picture of a man in a wheelchair and two women are walking by and it’s just amazing. You look at those two sexy, attractive women walking by the man in a wheelchair. Two different worlds juxtaposed like that. 

What projects are you working on now?

I’m working on a book about Southeast Asia and have some other interesting projects that keep me busy.

You are known for your interest in humanitarian projects. What are some of the ones you’ve been involved with?

I have worked with other Magnum photographers for The Global Fund to Fight AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria. In 2007, The Global Fund initiated a joint project with Magnum, to document the positive impact that free antiretroviral drug treatment is having on the lives of millions of HIV-positive and AIDS patients around the world. 

We picked subjects who had just started the treatment and then we went back four months later to see how the treatment was impacting the disease. If the people follow the regimen they can resume a normal life, unless they are already too advanced. We want to bring attention to this program because something like 30 million people in the world have AIDS. When you see how it affects peoples’ lives…obviously there’s the human, emotional component. But there’s also the economic component. 

If one of the parents gets AIDS and dies, usually the father, then the mother is left to raise the children and to try to make a living, and perhaps she has contracted AIDS, too. I was just down in Washington, D.C., for the opening of the show, called Access to Life, at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, where the exhibition is appearing June–July, 2008. The exhibition will travel to major cities around the world during 2008 and 2009. There are online video pieces and a book will be published. 

On my web site I have an appeal for Imagineasia. I started this nonprofit endeavor with family and friends. It’s a simple attempt to get textbooks, pencils, and notebooks to the Bamiyan region of Afghanistan, where the Hazara people live. This region is particularly neglected. The idea is that we can do something simple, something direct, that gets supplies and money directly to the people. You know, it’s a fortunate thing that as an artist or a photographer, you can always donate your work for a charitable cause. I think it’s one of the important functions of photography to draw attention to problems and then to see if we can educate people so that it might motivate them to want to make the world a better place. One of the journals of philanthropy stated that the picture of the Afghan Girl had raised more money than any other picture. That is gratifying.

There is a strong emphasis on portraiture in your work. Why is that so important to you?

As human beings we are all fascinated with each other and how we look. Diane Arbus talked about the gap between intention and effect in portraiture. People put on make-up and adorn themselves because they want to create an effect and give a certain impression, but often other people look at them and say it’s tragic or comical or curious or funny or odd. Arbus photographed a woman on Park Avenue trying to make a statement with her appearance, but in fact we see through it, we see the folly. Portraiture can be that kind of sharp critique. We go to another culture to observe how other people live. Sometimes you look at somebody on the street and they just seem to have a strong presence, a look, a certain kind of attribute that comes out in the face.

In Tibet, for instance, where people have such a great sense of style, an innate fashion sense, they come out of the mountains wearing these outlandish hats, make-up, jewelry in their hair. The Jains in India have exalted and highly revered monks who are naked because they consider the sky to be their garment. They are detached from material things and being naked is a symbol of their renunciation. The nuns and monks wear masks to ensure that no germs or insects creep in. How did they arrive at that, as opposed to Islam where they go to the other end of the spectrum to be covered in flowing robes? I’ve learned that humor is universal. You do a little bit of mime and people laugh. It’s very easy to use humor to connect to people in any culture. Part of what I’ve done is to wander and observe the world. What else is more interesting that that? Sometimes I think it’s good to observe our planet as though we were dropped down here to make a field report on Planet Earth.

For more information visit www.stevemccurry.com Steve McCurry’s work will be on exhibition at the Open Shutter Gallery August 21st – October 1st, 2009. For more information you can visit their website at www.openshuttergallery.com or call 970.382.8355.

Jain Kelly was the assistant director of The Witkin Gallery in New York during the 1970s. She is an author, appraiser, and fine-art photography advisor.  She edited Darkroom 2 (Lustrum Press, 1978) and Nude: Theory (Lustrum Press, 1979). She was the photo researcher for A World History of Photography by Dr. Naomi Rosenblum (Abbeville Press, 1984) and the author of the biographical section of A History of Women Photographers by Dr. Rosenblum (Abbeville Press, 1994).  She has written articles for Art in America and Popular Photography. Her E-Mail is [email protected].

This is the indispensable interview that enables the emerging collector of large-scale contemporary photography to get his or her feet on the ground, which allows the seasoned collector to receive answers to any still dangling questions, and that encourages the inquisitive to satisfy his or her curiosity.

To begin with, thanks to both Sarah Hasted and you for agreeing to do these interviews.

We believe so completely in what we are doing that we want to support any publication, like Focus, which is trying to promote the appreciation and collecting of photography. So, it is our pleasure.

How do you feel about the relative demise of black-and-white photography?

“Relative demise?” I’ve two things to say. The photography market is a field that developed out of an interest in small precious objects; it was a book dealer’s aesthetic and world. For a very long time it was about vintage silver prints. That was what was for sale in the marketplace, both at auction and in galleries. But things began to change. More people got interested in the field. That was one thing.

Then technology changed, and people — artists — could make work in different ways. That was the second thing. People could hardly wait to show you the world’s most dreadful looking, large-scale, color, inkjet prints. With those early digital color prints you’d go, “that looks just awful,” but the color photography market continued to develop and expand.

I do have a real disappointment in so much of the contemporary black-and-white work being produced. I find it really hard to find stuff that’s printed [snap! of the fingers] so it just crackles. I know some people who can do it; they’re really great. Michael Flomen. He is the best. A couple of others. Tom Sandberg. There isn’t much “forward thinking” conceptually either.

It seems like the great black-and-white print now is an antiquity. There are very few practitioners. Larry Fink has a great line about black-and-white prints. He says you want to make a print so good you want to lick it. You don’t see that so much anymore.

One of the ways in which photography can behave is magnetically. With really good photographs, you want to get physically closer. At the same time some can behave in just the opposite way; they push you away like the work of Joel-Peter Witkin. Dramatically that’s what they have going for them. But I think with the really good ones, you want to go like, “oh my god, mmm, good.”

Do you recommend to collectors that they begin a thematic collection?

Here’s my recommendation. I think it’s invaluable to determine your taste, and then to be able to articulate your taste because you can then tell a dealer what it is that you like. You should challenge your taste, too; you should look at other things because if you just keep reinforcing your taste, it will be incredibly redundant. A good collection is stimulating and nurturing. I can think of two instances where I have been in dealers’ residences and they have said, “You know that whole thematic thing, well, it’s just nothing. It’s just silly.”

Here in New York at a dealer’s home, I replied, “Well, what’s the deal on all these little coronas of light in every single photograph in your collection?” It was as if he had never seen his photographs. He loved the little commas of light, little highlights on the photographs.

At a dealer’s home in California, it was the same thing. I said, “What’s the deal with all this deep perspective falling off on the right of the image?” They didn’t know their taste, and that it was amazingly consistent. They didn’t recognize that. That kind of knowledge is a way of having the most fun with a collection. That and when it has some very personal reference.

There’s a very nice man named John Bennette, who’s a collector and an art consultant. I am John Bennette’s “Victor Frankenstein.” He is my monster. I let him loose. It was like Pandora opening the box. I let him loose at an AIPAD panel about 15 years ago. I still could kill him because he completely seduced the audience and took up all my time. I remember the first photograph that he showed: a Sally Gall photograph of a wave. He put this slide up, and he said, “This is about my childhood.” You could hear the audience going like, “Huh? What is this?” And he said, “I was raised in Alabama, and I never thought I would see the ocean.” He was so engaging to the audience because pictures can behave like a diary. With my collection, I can tell you where I was, not necessarily literally to give you the date, but I can tell you where I was psychologically.

They’re very much a record of either something that had taken place, or something that was in the works. Sometimes it was something that I didn’t find out about until later. It was like taking a souvenir from a little period of time. A lot of times it’s just unconscious. You wonder, “Why does this mean so much to me?” And the really strong pictures do that. Sometimes you go, “What was I thinking?” Out of all my pictures, there are surprisingly few that never get out of the box, that haven’t held my interest.

What is your take on why, in the 1970s, large-scale color photographs began to attract collectors who previously had purchased only paintings?

I think that part of the transition had to do with artists like Tina Barney or Sandy Skoglund having the technical possibility of making a color print that could mimic — I think this is a trope from critic Andy Grundberg — that could mimic the way in which paintings behaved, in terms of size, and how they played on the wall. I suppose you could make a case that some of the marketplace was people buying fake paintings.

But I think that the wise people within all of that — and I hope this was the larger percentage — actually were reacting to the work, believing that it was powerful work, and thinking, wasn’t it swell that the photographs behave like paintings — in terms of real estate — taking up more space on the wall? Also, the colors, I think, were remarkable to people. I never hear anyone talk about that, but you look at some of these large color prints from the 70s, and your eye just dances. Look at the early Jan Groover stuff. There’s a delight in those prints because they’re color. And some of those Eggleston pictures where the color transcends the subject matter, like the bathroom, the green bathroom. I’ve got his image of the naked dentist, which is a very red picture. And a dye transfer to boot. The 1970s prints pulse with the color.

The photographers in your gallery do editions of their prints. Do contemporary photographers ever resist the idea of editioning?

Yes and no. The whole editioning thing in photography is at least 30 years old. It goes back to when Washington, D.C., dealer Harry Lunn put together underwriting for printing a set of some of Ansel Adams’s images. It was as if it were written in stone that Ansel Adams wouldn’t print those images anymore after the edition. To photographers, part of the argument in favor of editioning is, why would you want to be in the darkroom for the rest of your life printing this old picture? Don’t you want to go out and be creative and make new pictures? It’s interesting that early on, it didn’t seem to be a serious consideration or issue, and then it was.

It was just dropped in everybody’s lap suddenly. It’s actually a conceit that’s taken from prints. The analogy between the print world and the photography world is not exact because the process is different, but photography seems to have taken the language and the way of doing it. I don’t think the younger photographers know the history of editioning. I think they were just taught: this is what you do, and they do it.

Many of them, I don’t think they’ve ever really broken it down and gone like well, why are we doing this? We — dealers — are enforcing a kind of rarity on this, and the feeling seems to be in favor of simply accepting the convention.

Do you find that most of the photographers who sell the wall-size color prints have other people making them?

Yes.

So wouldn’t that of itself obviate the argument that a photographer needs to edition in order to get out of the darkroom and create new work?

No. That would be missing a step: how do you deal with a computer file? It’s very complicated and it requires the equivalent of darkroom time. You have to go in and calibrate it and get it to be what you want. I don’t think it’s not as much time as darkroom time, but it involves an investment of time and thought even if it’s instructing someone who’s actually sitting there with a computer mouse. It’s your eye that’s signing off on what that image is going to look like.

So you’re saying that the productive thing for the photographer is, make all the prints in the edition at the same time and then you’re finished with that negative forever and you can spend your time creating new work?

You don’t have to do all the prints at once because the computer file will, supposedly, have life. What does happen, though, is that paper changes over time, so there are variables. Also you have to consider the economics of this. Printing is expensive.

So if you want this certain effect on this particular paper, you really had better go forward in the edition before the manufacturer stops making the paper?

I think the hope is you’re going to sell out the edition within three years and the materials will still be available within that time frame. But the old timers always mourn, “They don’t make that paper any more. ” Nothing changes.

When you work with a photographer to recommend an edition — and most of them are very small — like three, five, or ten — how do you come to a decision?

It’s like Goldilocks. Sarah Hasted and I will sit here and we’ll go like — too high? …too low?…just right! If someone is doing something that has a very conventional sense, then you would do an edition in a larger size of ten and a smaller size of twenty. People — collectors — anticipate that. If the work seems a little rarer than that — and who’s saying rare? I don’t know, me or the artist or whoever — let’s say there’s a piece that’s going to be unusually large, for example. We’ll keep that edition very, very small. You know, it’s all fake. It’s just a commercial consideration, which has nothing to do with anything.

What do you recommend about pricing to a young photographer who is just starting out?

I think they have to have two numbers and there are a couple of variables, size being one. You, as the photographer, have to recognize that if you’re working with a gallery it’s going to be a 50/50 split. So if you’re trying to sell stuff as an individual, without any representation, you should make it a real number which, when doubled, won’t exceed $1,500 or $2,000.

If you’re sitting at home with your portfolio of pictures and you go, “Well, these are all $2,500,” I, as a dealer, would just laugh at you. I can’t sell your pictures for $5,000, unless there’s some extraordinary circumstance. You just have to be sensible as to what’s already there in the marketplace. And you do want to sell them, too. I mean, if you are just going to sit there with all your $5,000 photographs, it shows a real sort of blindness as to what might actually be happening in the marketplace. Educate yourself. Get out. Look around. See what’s going on. People see these big pictures at big prices, but pricing is a real artful thing. You price them too high, and you piss people off. Pricing. It’s really hard to do… well, it’s not that hard.

So in terms of a price range within your gallery, the low point would be like a couple of thousand and the high point would be what? $30,000 to $40,000?

For an artist with one or two shows. Yes, but those are exceptional. The higher end contemporary stuff in our gallery is 20 to 30. Erwin Olaf and Bohnchang Koo are higher but they’ve been around longer and have international careers. We don’t present much vintage stuff, and we don’t have an inventory of secondary market. We do have vintage and secondary occasionally, but we’ve either borrowed it or gotten it on consignment and so the price tag might be $100,000 – $250,000.

By secondary, you mean resale of things you’ve sold before?

Yes, or that somebody else owns, and we are the agent for it.

What are your thoughts on color photography in relation to its longevity?

Passion! That’s what should inform the acquisition. The discussion about conservation issues should not dissuade the passion. Collecting involves a question of committing. Part of my frustration with teaching a class on collecting or even going to a lecture on collecting is that there is an emphasis on connoisseurship, which I do think can be distorted and distracting.

Connoisseurship is a real issue, a big issue, when you’re buying something for a half-million dollars. If you’re going to buy a house, you’re going to call an expert and say, “What do you think about this piece of real estate.Should I buy it?” That’s when you call in someone. If you’re buying something that’s under $100,000 and you’ve got the wherewithal to spend $100,000, it’s going to be a very personal purchase. So the emphasis should be — in the decision to buy — the passion. I think often the question of the longevity of color is a reflex that comes up as a reason not to commit. People say it is going to be very fugitive. Well, it is, in fact, fugitive. Your great-great-grandchildren may see a lesser version of this picture. I have a large Cindy Sherman, and I think the color has shifted. Does it bother me? It doesn’t bother me.

What kind of color?

It’s a C-print [Chromogenic print]. It’s funny because Cindy Sherman’s assistant sent me a scan of what the picture is supposed to look like and I went like, oh, mine still pretty much looks like that. I’ve had the picture for 25 years and somebody had it before me. Who’s to say what the shift is or if, actually, there is one?

You know, there’s a conceptual sculptor named Tom Friedman who does stuff with everything — cotton, sugar cubes, chewing gum. The guy is a genius. So, here’s the question. You’re not going to buy the bubble gum piece because it’s going to get brittle in nine months?

Yes, you’re going to buy it because it’s thrilling and terrific. In AIPAD [The Association of International Photography Art Dealers] the dealers are always saying, “Let’s have a color symposium.” I did a color symposium for the dealers. None of them came. So, it behaves like a smoke screen to some extent for me, the color conversation. The symposium was at 9 a.m. on a Sunday, but still.

Do clients ask you that kind of question, specifically?

If they’re a long-time client of mine, they don’t, because we’ve already talked about everything. If clients want to read the literature, I’ll get them the literature. It’s like, say you’re going to buy a couch, and you ask if you should get a fabric that’s been treated with some sort of stain guard or shouldn’t you. I’ll get you the literature, and you can decide. But I guarantee the conversation will be about the photograph and the artist, not it’s longevity. What’s more of an issue, I will say, is face-mounted plexi with color.

What is face-mounted plexi?

Face-mounted Plexiglas. It is Plexiglas that adheres flush to the face of the photograph, as opposed to the print being mounted from behind. It’s been around for the last dozen years. It’s something that you saw initially coming out of Europe. And it’s a real look. It’s like plastic furniture in the ’50s or little white Courreges boots in the ’60s. In 20 years you’ll look at these pictures and you’ll go like, oh, yeah, 1997.

This is completely personal though. Artists who do it, like it. Fine. But it is now much more of an issue than the color process itself — face-mounting — for the museums. Increasingly, American museums will not buy it. Their apprehension is based on not knowing what the chemistry trapped under the Plexiglas will do years from now. For me it is aesthetic. But a big color picture has got to be mounted on something. Mounted from behind on aluminum or Sintra dibond.

What is Sintra?

Sintra is a miracle; I think it’s an incredibly durable plastic. It’s stable, chemically inert. You want something that isn’t going to interact with the chemistry of the picture. Sintra also has the quality that it doesn’t bend much. Aluminum will bend.

What do you advocate for the front of the picture?

Then I just do conventional framing. The picture there is shadowbox framing. [pointing to a very large color photograph by Andreas Gefeller]. It feels like it weighs about 200 pounds, well, actually it’s about 70. It takes two men to lift it into place on the wall.

Is that glass or plexi on the front?

It’s plexi. It doesn’t touch the print. There’s a space. If it were black-and-white, I’d probably advocate for glass, probably Den Glass, which is a brand of glass. I have a brilliant artist I mentioned named Michael Flomen from Montreal who works in black-and-white. He does huge prints and puts non-reflective glass on them so that you see the print. It’s important with him to see the paper. But with the color work and the Plexiglas, it’s OK because there’s going to be a little bit of bounce anyway; the paper’s going to have a little sheen.

Are there any generalizations to be made about the clients who come to you?

No. They tend to have a lovely spirit and open heart, the ones who come to us. I used to think we got risk takers, but I think that people are very sophisticated now about looking and they know what they are doing.

No, I don’t think there’s any general rule at all. You hope like mad that you’re going to have a hard-core group that’s going to buy a couple things within a year. But there’s no generality at all.

How do you see American finances at this moment, in 2009: the combination of the low dollar and a possible recession? Are you at this point beginning to see a powerful impact on people’s purchasing habits?

I see it in traffic in Chelsea. Traffic is down. Part of it is that it is summer, too. A dealer colleague asked me confidentially if summer seemed to have started early this year.

And how long has this been in progress?

Not that long, but it’s a little self-fulfilling because, going back six months, you’re sitting here thinking, “Is this coming, is this coming? It’s not here yet; it’s not here yet.” But, to compensate, the European thing is wild now. In some respects the low dollar has been great because we have lots of European clients who we didn’t used to have, who come to us to buy work by European artists because it’s cheaper here. It is.

So you would say there’s been a real heating up of Europeans coming to you?

Oh, yeah. And South America. We did Art Miami last year. That was great! That was all new “meat” coming into the booth, and they were great. For the most part, there was no fooling around. Just, “Let’s do it.” And now you can Google people to find out who they are. Also in terms of business, Sarah and I work like mad doing outreach to connect with new collectors and possible clients, especially corporate, in spite of perceptions about the U.S. economy.

Is New York still the center of the art world?

Yes. I certainly think it will be the center for a long time because the commercial aspects of it are here. Advertising and magazines. Ultimately, the larger percentage of photographers make their living in the commercial sector. Even if they’re not living here, the agents for their work will be here. Physically, geographically, things are getting distributed because you can be like Dan Winters and live in Austin, Texas.

He doesn’t have to be in New York, with FedEx and email. But if I, as a dealer, want to see new work, I’m often better off not being in New York. Part of it is you just concentrate differently. At the Arles Festival in France, I am definitely working, but I have shorts on and it’s a little different. I just have a little more time to dance around with photographers.

Do you still see Chelsea as the center within New York, in addition to 57th Street? The scene was in SoHo, then Chelsea. Do you foresee it moving to someplace like Dumbo or elsewhere?

I don’t know. It’s a good question. We do have a long-term lease. That is a factor. The Dumbo thing — we had a real estate person show us places and promise us the moon. If I were 25, and building a different kind of business, I’d go there in a heartbeat. Fun. They’ve got trees and a park and the river. It’s a very different place, but I can’t invent a new client base quickly enough to set up a new shop there. And I don’t honestly believe we could get enough of our current clients to go there.

How do you find your photographers?

We look at everything. We no longer look at portfolios submitted directly to the gallery, but we look at books and websites and blogs and go to art fairs and art festivals. If someone is single-minded enough they can get the work in front of me. And I respect that and I think that if they’ve got that much intention, I’ll look. Maybe it’s meant to be. Sarah and I work at the same long desk but we email each other all the time saying, did you see this? It’s so hard to find something.

People bring us stuff, too. Like James Mollison. A publisher brought him to us. Andreas Gefeller — a photo editor brought him to us. Michael Thompson — in September we went to a wedding in his studio and Sarah started talking to him. So that’s how we got him.

Paolo Ventura — he did a blind submission. They were very, very different pictures. At the time he had photographs of mummies in the catacombs of Palermo, kind of grisly. The dead were buried in very fancy clothes — satins and velvets. With new artists we send them to The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine to see how they fly there. Both magazines published Paolo Ventura.

Luc Delahaye, he’s the only one Sarah and I ever saw in the same instant. We were at the ICP Infinity Awards. They were showing these images from his project on Russia, Winterreise, on the screen, and you would have thought we were watching fireworks at our table because we were making so much noise. I mean we were going like, “Oooohhhh” and “Aaaahhhh.” It was exciting. Those pictures were off the charts brilliant. I’m looking for something that I haven’t seen before. If I could tell you what it looked like, I would. I can tell you what it doesn’t look like. It doesn’t look like something I have already seen. I want to be amazed. It’s like the Diaghilev thing: “Astonish me!” I want that experience where my jaw drops and I go, “Oh, my god.” So that’s one element of it. A second element of it is that it has to be something that I’m excited to talk about. That’s part of what we do here. I want it to be the kind of work that when I get out of bed in the morning, I’m so excited to go downtown to the gallery to promote this work. Sarah and I are blessed with very, very similar responses to work, and we must agree on a photographer.

I used to be an actor, and part of the similarity between show business and being an art dealer is the imagination. This is not brain surgery…I mean, we’re not curing anything here — maybe people’s depression. But the fun for me is, how do I make this happen? How do I get people to come here? How do I get a magazine to print this work? How do we take our excitement and transmit that to other people? That’s great. That’s really fun. You sit here thinking up things to do. OK, the show I’ve got up now, James Mollison, in the course of one day I called the Explorer’s Club, I called the Hard Rock Café corporate headquarters, I called the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, the American Museum of Natural History. By “call,” I mean I’m online and I’m going through the masthead of who is there who might be responsive. And it’s different for Mollison than for Paolo Ventura or for Michael Thompson. Here’s a third element regarding new artists. We have a “no sociopath rule.” If you’re nuts, I’m just not interested.

Does that rule apply to clients as well?

Well, with the client thing I’ll go a little further. But with the artists, I’m just not interested. If you’re that hard, I’m not going to be any good for you anyway. I don’t want to argue with you. I want you to be excited to be part of this program. The first sign of temperament: No. No, no, no. I want to work with you. I don’t want to fight with you, and I want to collaborate with you. I’m not going to tell you what to do and you’re not going to tell me. We must have a genuine sympathy and regard for each other.

Do you have special tips for collectors on what to buy? Any suggestions on undervalued pockets of photography or trends in the marketplace?

I think that my tip for a collector is: if you love it, buy it. If you can afford it, buy it, because it’s not going to get cheaper. If you are an imaginative collector, I think there’s a way of shopping around the edge of things. There’s a real excitement in finding work by somebody who may not be on the radar in a very sizeable way. That’s what dealers are looking for, the artist who hasn’t really, really happened yet. Maybe you can get in early and do that. I also think that a collector who is not a shopper, who’s not just a hedge-fund guy with an art buyer who can shop until he’s stupid, but someone who is invested in this personally, will look at the vintage market. Lately the auction catalogues demonstrate that the houses are in pursuit of work that hasn’t been in the mainstream. They are beginning to work somewhat “outside of the box” like dealers.

That’s how you find stuff that’s undervalued, and then it gets to be of greater value, like Erwin Olaf, our guy. You wouldn’t describe it as real vintage work, but he has increasing “size” in the secondary market now. The same with Paolo Ventura. A picture we sold six months ago is on the cover of an Italian auction catalogue. That career will have real size. A place you would find some undervalued artists is the vintage work by female photographers. You’ll find that it’s completely disproportionate and that the female work is undervalued. Look at someone like Florence Henri — very credible work. Dorothea Lange, the Margaret Bourke-White stuff. I don’t know that there’s any consistent sense of what any of that work should be priced at. I don’t know what the prices are, but some of that work is just thrilling.

If you were looking for an MO on how to get in on this stuff, that’s the way I’d look at it. You know, I love when people buy all of somebody. We have a client, Alan Siegel, who went around collecting E. J. Kelty, who did these great circus groups. Alan bought Congress of Clowns, Congress of Freaks, etc. working with Miles Barth. Those pictures are great, and they’re a funny little American anomaly. They’re never going to worth be a million dollars, but man, are they good. And that’s fun for a collector. So Alan bought ’em all and did a book. In regard to trends in photography, and trends anywhere, not only am I not a follower or a joiner…you know the Groucho Marx remark, “I wouldn’t want to belong to a club that would have me….” I think what’s exciting is what’s fresh, what you discover, what you walk into and you say, “Oh my god, this artist is showing me something. I never saw it this way before. I never knew about this. Thank you very much.” That’s what I’m curious to do. It’s so impossible to identify that. If I could tell you what it was, then I’d be ahead of the game.

So often you’re on the tail end of something. You know, we could talk about the snapshot phenomenon and how this developed and came about…sure, now there are dozens of snapshot shows all over. Where did all of that come from? It kind of came from a few shows and then people said that’s a decent idea, let’s do that.

What is your background?

I am from St. Clair, Michigan. A sweet, little town. I went to prep school, so I had a highfalutin’ East Coast education at Andover. I started business school at the University of Michigan and one day I was sitting in an accounting class. I was two months into the semester and I’m sitting there and I thought, “I don’t have a clue what’s going on.” I was literally copying other people’s homework, and I had no idea what they were talking about. “Get out. Run for your life.” So I changed all my classes to theater and was happy, happy, happy.

How did you start collecting photographs?

The collection, which has a name — Collection Dancing Bear — is now in about its 35th year. It consists of pictures of people — magical, heart-stopping images — in which you cannot see their eyes. That’s it. I was in Sotheby’s and I bought a picture by Imogen Cunningham. It’s called The Dream and it’s a picture of a veiled woman. It wasn’t truly vintage; it’s a later print. I had had this idée fixe that I was going to find a picture of somebody in which I couldn’t see their eyes.

So I bought that and took it home and thought what a strange thing. It was as if I were possessed. Something I don’t hear talked about in collecting — not only at auction, but it’s certainly more evident at auction — is how adrenalizing it is to find a picture that just makes you explode. You see something and you go, “Oh my god, oh my god — eureka!” And stuff goes off in your body. You covet it, you want to consume it, and you want to take it home. And so I had this Cunningham. I started looking around New York, and it used to take you about two hours to see photography. You’d go to Witkin Gallery, you’d go to Light, you’d go to the Museum of Modern Art, go to Marlborough, and you were done. And Robert Miller, eventually. And you could see every photograph in New York in an afternoon. I didn’t have a lot of money. I was an actor and I had some outside income, not any great shakes, but photography didn’t cost a lot of money.

So I’d buy a couple of things here and there and was off in a vacuum. And you know prices have always been a step ahead of my income. I can remember one year announcing with a fair amount of pride that it was a big year because it was the first year I owed money…internationally. But I’m a square client; I pay my bill. I shop to the point where if I’m out of money, that’s it. I’m not meant to have it. First time I ever really stepped up was an Irving Penn, still the cornerstone of the collection — Morocco, 1971, the two veiled women on the cover of the book Worlds in a Small Room. This was it for me. Christie’s had a print of it. And I said to myself, “The hope of scoring a bargain on that was not going to happen.” Was I prepared to do it? And I DID it, and it was GREAT. That was the first time I ever went, “I cannot afford this picture…I almost cannot afford this picture.” For the real collector, can you afford not to have it?

How did you select the name Collection Dancing Bear?

It’s a story that’s not all that interesting, but I’m happy to tell it to you. I went to Africa for my 40th birthday. Somebody said, “Oh, you’re an interesting guy. Do you have your card?” I said, “I’m an actor. I’m in Africa. I don’t have a business card.” I came back to New York, and I had a credit at a stationery store. So I went in to get them made.

I was choosing the design of the business card and that upper-left hand corner kind of blinked at me where you put “real estate broker” or whatever. Well, “out-of-work actor?” How would that look? In the end I put “Dancing Bear.” The history of Dancing Bear is that I had developed a script with someone based on Randy Newman’s songs. The script was a two-person musical titled The Story of a Man Named John and a Woman Named Mary, Sometimes Called Marie, Told Through the Words and Music of Randy Newman, or You and Me. In that, there’s a song that’s great called “Simon Smith and the Amazing Dancing Bear.” In the piece I was the “Dancing Bear.” It was a very good fit for me. So I took to being this strange, surrealist collector, scouring the galleries of Manhattan and signing the guest book, “D. Bear.” Having “Dancing Bear” on a business card proved to be an incredible litmus test meeting new people. It was easy to find the humorless ones.

So over a 35-year period, about how many pictures entered this collection?

It breaks down in two ways. There are probably about 700–800 authored images for which I could tell you the names of the photographers. Then there are probably another 500 pictures that are either vernacular or anonymous. So maybe it’s like 800 hard-core pictures and 500 less hard-core. Now there are a lot of snapshots. Part of what happens to a collector is you never really lose the addiction, but lots of things happen: you’re distracted, your interest changes. Within the collection you can see different interests. In the last five or seven years, the pictures that have come into the collection have almost nothing to do with “no eyes” except for the fact that they’re abstractions. If I say it’s part of the collection, it is. You might wonder if the Miguel Rio Branco picture of a colored hoop is about “no eyes”? And I would say it’s a face. I see a face. He sees a face; Miguel sees a face.

Another interest: there was a whole period of my life when I liked pictures of people flying, but what’s that got to do with “no eyes”? First of all, they’re not looking at the camera. But it’s like existential distancing, which seems to be a part of the collection, a sense of alienation, aloneness. Those are different ways and directions that the collection has taken over a period of time. Then one day I saw a Bill Brandt photograph of Dubuffet in a show at the Met, and I went like, “Oh, my god! Oh, my god!” This whole interview seems to be me going. “Oh, my god! Oh, my god!” It was one of those situations when I was all by myself, and I just wanted to grab some tourist and go like, “Look at this picture. This is a great picture. Did you see this picture?” Then to myself I am thinking how exciting the picture is. “I’ve got to have this picture!” And then I realize, of course, that this is a picture of somebody with his eye wide open. It took a little while to find a print of the picture to purchase, but it was emblematic that I was done. End of the road.

Tell us about the book being made of Collection Dancing Bear.

I was invited to show the collection at the Arles Festival in France and we edited it down to 380 pictures. The French, in their delicious perversity, loved my show. It was totally the “dark horse” show. The word of mouth was great. And I would go and look at it and I would see people come back to it. That was so much fun. I would just sit there in a chair in the exhibition looking at people looking at the show. And I would find curators coming back to look at it a second time, which was a huge compliment. So the show’s up and about six weeks later I get a message from Thomas Neurath, the publisher of Thames & Hudson. And it says, “Mr. Hunt, I’ve seen your show at Arles and thought that it was incredibly personal.” The letter was sort of an encomium to the collection that I never would have written out of modesty. It was thrilling, this letter. All this stuff about how great it was and surprising and, “Wouldn’t it make a great book, don’t you think?” Of course it would make a great book, but I always thought I would have to go pitch it someplace.

So here this really good publisher comes to me and I go, “OK, good. That’s great.” And then he, over the course of some conversation, indicates to me that he’s going to delegate his sister, who’s the long-time art director, as the producer. Her name’s Constance Kaine. So Connie Kaine and I agree to have a rendezvous in Arles in September, when the show is going to close. So we made arrangements to meet and I stood her up because I didn’t want to watch the show with her. I wanted her to do it all by herself. When we did finally meet, she was, understandably, steamed. I explained my reasoning. She understood that completely, and revealed that she was working part-time at Thames & Hudson because she had gone back to school to become a Jungian analyst. She understands this collection better than I do. I just adore this woman.

She is my editor and she has more style than anybody I ever met. She is funny, bright, totally on the same page about these pictures. So, I’m at this company, where I know the publisher and his sister, and the book should come out this fall or in the spring of 2009 with the title The Unseen Eye: A Life in Photographs. Now there’s a new collection. I’ve been buying pictures of groups of people. I’m no longer alone out there. I am intrigued by American groups before 1955 and I like pictures that look like — I describe them as looking like musical scores, meaning the blacks and the whites have some unusual and strong graphic energy.

Also I am fascinated by how groups behave in space. I’m not so interested in the authorship in this collection. I tend to buy much of this on eBay. I never read this about collecting, but for a really, really good active collector, the stuff finds YOU. You’re sitting there, and the phone rings, and it’s the photograph. And I think that’s great.

Could you tell us about your personal background?

I went to school at the College of Santa Fe and originally began my studies in painting and printmaking. I discovered photography with the help of my teacher and mentor, David Scheinbaum, who worked with historian and photographer Beaumont Newhall. David also happened to own a gallery with his wife Janet Russek, who was working with color photographer Eliot Porter at the time. I did an internship at the gallery while attending the College of Santa Fe studying for my Bachelor of Fine Arts degree, specializing in photography.

After graduating I worked with Schein-baum and Russek Gallery as well as curated for a private collector. To keep my hand in the production side of the medium, I worked with a photographer named Joan Myers, whom I adore. I did everything from assisting with the platinum and palladium printing to printing silver prints for her many publications. All of that was so rewarding. After working in Santa Fe for five years, I was antsy to move to New York. I was hired by Howard Greenberg and worked with his gallery for two years until Bill Hunt called me when the former director of Ricco Maresca Gallery resigned.

They were building a new photography department and wanted Bill and me to design the programming and find the artists. The two of us worked very hard to get that department up and running. We did that for ten years. Eventually Ricco Maresca asked us to be partners with them, but Bill and I felt strongly that we would not be able to do anything new with them that we hadn’t already done and we decided that a clean break would have more clarity. I’ve been working in photography now for about 23 years, ever since college, and I’ve known Bill Hunt forever.

When did you and Bill begin this gallery in New York, HASTED HUNT?

We started this gallery in 2005. We kept the roster of artists we built while we were in our other incarnation, but parted ways with a few over time and added a number of new artists whose work was in keeping with our current programming. We are going into our third year. It’s been terrific.

Is your specialty the wall-size contemporary color photograph?

Not necessarily. Bill and I do specialize — we say that we’re a contemporary art gallery specializing in photography — and I think that’s because there’s still that sort of goofy question that comes up, “Is photography art?” I am always still surprised that it comes up in this day and age, but it does. My background is predominantly vintage photography. Over the years I have represented work by such artists as Paul Strand, Alfred Stieglitz, Aaron Siskind, Ralph Eugene Meatyard, Beaumont Newhall, Eliot Porter, Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and so many more. I have placed the works of all these people in prestigious collections throughout the years. A lot of vintage photography passed through that gallery and also through Howard Greenberg, of course. So I have great reverence and respect for vintage photography and I have a history with it — as well as that great love of the past.

When Bill and I opened our own gallery, we wanted to be able to show photography we loved. I had always loved Aaron Siskind’s series “The Pleasures and Terrors of Levitation” and I wanted to show that work. That was a great goal of mine, so we showed it this last fall with Lisette Model’s portfolio. It was just a beautiful show that I was ecstatic with.

We’ve exhibited work by Erich Salomon at the same time as Chris Morris, because Salomon could be considered the first political photographer and Chris Morris is a contemporary photographer on staff with George W. Bush; we liked the comparison. We usually try to show two people at the same time to demonstrate aesthetic and compositional relationships. We curated a Joel-Peter Witkin vintage show — his greatest hits — and sold everything. It took me three years to gather that work. We represent Eugene Richards and we decided to go all the way back and start with “Dorchester Days,” the work he did in the ’60s and ’70s.

However, predominantly what we represent are emerging and established contemporary photographers like Erwin Olaf, Martin Schoeller, Lynne Cohen, Paolo Ventura, Andreas Gefeller, Gerald Slota, and Julian Faulhaber, who do large-scale, color work. We find work that we are connected to, instantly. Bill and I always say that we represent the thing that we’ve never seen before. It’s exciting for us to have diverse programming and a diverse roster and we take a great deal of time to make those selections. The programming of HASTED HUNT is very deliberate.

Do you have a personal collection and if so, what kinds of things do you collect?

When I moved to New York I started collecting formally. I thought, “Wouldn’t it be great if I collected some vintage works of New York by some of the great New York photographers.” Then that changed when I married my husband, Mark W. Mann, who is an artist.

We started buying things together and the collection became more than just photography; it became about images, paintings, drawings, and photographs that both of us loved. It’s not a huge collection like Bill Hunt’s. I don’t think it ever will be. We don’t have the room to handle it, but I do think the pictures we collect are pictures that inspire us — something that brings us great joy when we look at it. The most recent photograph Mark and I have acquired is a Vik Muniz of Mr. Rogers.

About how many photographs do you own at this point?

I probably have 200. That’s about as much as I can handle. Actually that is way more than I can possibly hang at one time, so we rotate the images about once a year or whenever we get a new one….

Do you find that the people who buy the large-scale color photographs also buy vintage?

Sometimes. There are people who collect only contemporary photography, but a lot of people who have collected vintage in the past are now moving into contemporary photography as well. There is a crossover, but when someone is extremely drawn to vintage photography, very rarely will they understand the larger scale Andreas Gursky photo. It seems to bewilder them. We were just having that conversation with a museum curator. He said sometimes large photos become pretty wallpaper and I understand that. I think that artwork in general should give you an immediate response when you look at it, that you should just be really thrilled that it’s part of your life. Some people buy for investment. They see it, they buy it, it goes into storage, and it comes up at auction a couple years later.

Does that happen with the large color photographs?

Absolutely. Flipping it right away could be beneficial, but it could also damage the artist if you put it up for auction and it doesn’t sell. That would end up doing both the artwork and the career of the artist a disservice. But I think there’s nothing wrong with buying it for investment, if you hang onto it for a couple years. I would prefer it if the client brought it back to me so I could find the perfect home for it.

If a photograph is sold out, there’s usually a wish list of people who want it. I call these people and say, this person would like to sell it, would you like to buy it? And in that case everybody’s happy. Also that way Bill and I can navigate the career of the artist a little more strategically instead of having random pieces going up for auction. I think that what’s very different now from when I first started in the business is the artists are much more deliberate about the trajectory of their career.

What is a typical edition for your artists, someone like Paolo Ventura?

An edition is usually around ten. I teach one day a week and I tell my students editioning is a very good thing, or at least numbering your pictures, but I would definitely encourage editioning because it allows you to move on artistically from that picture. You’re not continually printing that photograph again and again and again.

But what I encourage the artist to do is to hang on to one of the pictures for museum shows, for exhibitions. They have artist’s proofs and they can display those, but I think the editioning is valuable because it allows the artist to create other images that are more current. Also it allows collectors to know there’s only ten out there. Clients love limited editions.

John Szarkowski once said that the average photographer has a creative flowering of about ten years. If one were to play devil’s advocate, one could say, well, the poor artist needs to capitalize on that 10-year period by making prints from that group of negatives forever in order to support himself for the rest of his life.

Right, right, there are different arguments. Well, I do see the point of that. If you look at someone like André Kertész, whose career really took off toward the end of his life, he was finally reaping the benefits of all the hard work he had done up until that point. But the market is just so different, even from when I started. In the beginning there was no fine art print market for people like Eliot Porter, Beaumont Newhall, or André Kertész, so there was no need to make limited editions. Recently, we had an Eliot Porter show in conjunction with one of our contemporary artists, Bohnchang Koo.

A couple of clients asked, why didn’t Porter edition? I said because nobody bought these pictures then. I mean, if he got them on a Sierra Club calendar or in a book he was ecstatic, but that was the extent of it. The market started at the end of his life. However, I think that the collectors nowadays are so shrewd, so savvy, that for them, a contemporary artist who does not do editions is somebody who is likely to flood the market over time. I think everybody wants to know that the photographer is going to have a long career and that what they’re buying is worth something.

When you do the editions, do you do them in several different sizes?

Well, with some of them. With Paolo Ventura for example, it’s two sizes: editions of five and ten. Five in the large size, ten in the medium size. Andreas Gefeller does editions of eight, one size only; each picture has its own size. They really have chosen those edition sizes. I think that if you edition five and ten and then you have maybe 25 images in that particular series, that’s a lot of pictures. You can have a pretty substantial career.

My job is to sell not just one image but all of them. People respond to different images, so you’re hoping that the one that proves to be most popular isn’t going to be the only one that sells. Typically that’s not the case. Some people will buy an image because they see it will re-sell. And some people will buy because it’s the picture they like.

What is the size of this Paolo Ventura on the wall and what is his smaller size?

This is 40 x 50 inches, the smaller size is 30 x 40 inches.

What is the typical number of APs [Artist’s Proofs]?

I would say two. Three is pushing it. Two is enough, so if you want to sell one to a museum at the beginning of your career to get yourself started, and if you also want to hang on to one for insurance down the line, then you have the second one five years later when the MoMA has finally discovered you. But two is good. But, again, from the very beginning you have to declare it.

You have to say I’m making an edition of five with two or three APs. It is a declaration and it’s very, very important that you say that up front. There have been instances in the past where the photographer did not declare the APs and everything sold out and then the APs showed up. It’s completely unethical. The clients that purchased the works prior to the APs being printed should be very upset, because little did they know there’s an AP. So the photographer undermines his or her own market.

Collectors track this that closely?

They absolutely do. I had a collector come to me about a month or two ago who said, “How many APs does so-and-so do?” It was an artist I no longer represent. I said two. And he said, well I just saw a third one. And I said bad, bad, bad. So I cannot tell you how informed and educated collectors are and I think it’s terrific because they really know what they’re buying. There’s not any mystery there. If they have any questions…and if you function with integrity and you function with honesty…there’s nothing to hide.

Would you handle a contemporary artist who did not edition?

Probably not. I think it’s so unusual in this day and age that somebody would work that way.

So what happens now? When you take him on, do you say, “OK, you’re editioning now?”

That’s exactly what we do. We encouraged Eugene Richards to do an edition. He picked the size. He does an edition similar to James Nachtwey, an edition of 30, and you can get one either 16×20 inches or 20×24 inches. Eugene’s got great records as all artists should. But he never had a huge selling record prior to our representation so this was not difficult. I think it would be very hard to do that with somebody who had already sold a lot of pictures. It would be very tedious to retrace all of that information.

With my artists, I always ask, what is that you’re hoping for? What are your dreams and aspirations for a career? Some artists want to be famous. Other artists want to sell a lot of artwork. Some artists want to show only in museums. It depends on what those goals are. If an artist’s goal is to sell lots of pictures without editioning, just to flood the market and that’s their idea of success, I say more power to them. I don’t want to represent them, but I think it’s perfectly fine if that’s what makes them happy.

But I think that it hurts a career and hurts the marketplace when the artist is too prolific. When he floods the market it’s a disaster. It may make him happy, but I think he’s killing his secondary market. It’s not that I think an artist should be consumed with the secondary market — auctions — but they are important to the longevity of a career. Bill and I like to say we represent the past, present, and the future, of our artists — that we are all-encompassing. We put a lot of time and effort into an artist’s career, into an artist’s life. We really are in a relationship and a partnership with the artist, and we want to help him or her create a long career.

Does it ever happen, five years down the line that a photographer says, “You know I’m sold out completely on this picture and I don’t want to be sold out. I’d like to create an edition in another size.” Is that permissible within the gallery world today?

No. That is the cardinal rule that you never break. If an artist did that, we would not touch him with a ten-foot pole. He is committing career suicide. Because my reputation, his or her reputation, the market’s reputation, are shattered.

When you are selling a photograph and the client says OK there are only five of these in this size and you say yes, you are honor-bound to keep the integrity of that edition. There have been instances over the past 23 years when an artist has come to me and said I would like to do another size of this image because it is sold out. It was just a total battle, but guess who won. The gallery. Yes, because I think there are two things you never do as an artist or dealer: One is you never decrease your prices. That’s just completely unethical and completely wrong. Second, you have to declare your edition size from the get-go. You have to function with honor throughout your whole career. Within the photography world, going outside your edition is one of the most unethical things you can do.

But they have to be people with considerable sums of money?

Not necessarily. I mean we have a lot of collectors who are just getting started. It’s the first photograph they have ever bought.

But if it’s $20,000, that’s a brave beginning.

Yes, it is. I would say the new, just emerging photography collector is probably spending more like $5,000. Yes, $20,000 would be a little bit brave, but the funny thing is that it happens. The range is unbelievable. There are the photography collectors who want to start a collection but they don’t have lots of money, so they buy a photograph that’s maybe $4,000 to $5,000. And then you have somebody who’s been collecting photography for five years who is willing to spend tens of thousands of dollars in an afternoon.

Is there an average price of a photograph in your gallery?

I don’t know if there is an average price. There’s probably a range from $4,000 to $75,000. A couple of our contemporary artists have a resale market up to $100,000. I don’t know if there’s an average price…maybe it’s $10,000 to $20,000.

This also relates to the question of longevity of photographs. When people are spending this kind of money, do they ask questions about longevity of color?

Almost never. We definitely will get the question once in a while from someone who is just beginning to collect, as opposed to the seasoned collector who’s been buying for years. There are so many processes that are so archival now…the inkjet, even the Epson print. According to articles by expert Henry Wilhelm depending on the color process you select, the longevity of color photographs could vary from 100 to 300 years. A lot of photographers used to take photographs to New Mexico and stick them in the sun and do some tests. The “archivalness” of 99% of the processes now is very high in the quality of the inks and so on. Some people are still making Cibachromes and the “archivalness” of a Cibachrome is still great, but it’s very expensive to make the prints.

We still have very few collectors who will purchase Epson prints. They’re gorgeous, they’re beautiful, there’s nothing wrong with them; it’s just a mindset the collector’s in. Collectors like the C-print. Of course nobody calls them C-prints anymore. Now they’re called Digital C-prints.

What are Chromogenic prints?

Same thing. I think the question that comes up is, what does that mean? Because some artists will say Chromogenic, some people will say Digital C-prints, some will say, C-prints, Lightjet prints. The vocabulary is so eclectic now. I really do think the printer you’re using determines the quality of the print. Our artists work with reputable labs, so I trust them because I know their machines and I know what they’re doing. That is important. The question will come up, if this color photograph has direct sun, is that a bad thing?

And of course it is. No photograph should have direct sun. If you did have direct sun and you couldn’t avoid it, the only protection that would work is UV3 Plexiglas over the front of that photograph. That is the only thing that will block 99% of the light. So if it gets a ray of sunlight once a day for 15 minutes… as long as you have UV3 protection on that, it’s fine. I took a conservation seminar at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to make certain I was well informed and educated. We did tests for the glazing on photographs. UV3 was the only thing that blocked the rays. So even on black-and-white photographs, it’s not a bad idea.

Does museum glass incorporate UV3?

I do believe it incorporates some sort of protection, but not as much as UV3 plexi. It’s extremely expensive, as much as the photograph. Museum glass is great because it has non-glare. If you hang a photograph in your home and it’s not going to get direct sun, museum glass is great. But if you live in California and you’ve got nothing but skylights and open windows…

Bill said there was an issue with face-mounted Plexiglas on photographs.

Well, there isn’t really an issue with it. It’s perfectly archival and perfectly fine. In museums it becomes a little bit of an archival problem because they have to store it. It’s already quote-unquote “framed.” So if it’s face-mounted to the Plexiglas, it is an entity.

You cannot separate it — the Plexiglas — from that piece. You can’t unframe it and maybe tuck the frame away and store it flat. So it becomes a little bit of an archival pain in the behind for them because it becomes a little more bulky, and they don’t always have tons of room. And if you want to travel it, it can be a problem.

How does the artist get it to adhere?

There’s an archival adhesive. Andreas Gursky does it, for example. There are so many artists who use face-mounted plexi.

Is that on the wane?

I would say yes. It’s a beautiful presentation and perfectly fine and I think in a residence it looks amazing, but if you have kids and you’re going to put it in a high-traffic area, it’s probably not so great. If somebody walks by and they brush against it with a little backpack the whole piece is ruined.  One of our artists, Erwin Olaf, did a series of work presented on face-mounted plexi, which we showed. The pieces looked amazing. They sort of float off the wall and the mounting really enhances the color. He printed the work so that when the Plexiglas was on it, it would really pop the color out. We tried to put one in a frame and it looked ridiculous.

Bill’s collection travels quite a bit, so if a piece goes from Arles to Switzerland to Amsterdam, chances are it’s going to come back with a scratch on it. So then that piece would have to be replaced. If you are going to travel the artwork then it’s probably best to get it framed.

You used the word “replaced” while discussing the possibility of a work getting scratched while traveling. Did you mean that the artist would actually provide a new one?

He can replace it, if he’s willing to do it. I usually leave it up to the artist. Most artists will do it if the client pays the expenses. The client obviously would not pay the full retail. For example, you cannot replace a dye transfer print if it is damaged.

With dye transfer, do you really mean that you could never find anyone on the face of the planet who could do it?

The chemicals and paper are no longer made. I know of one man who bought up the last of the chemicals, but he uses them for himself and one other well-known photographer. It is the most archival color process because it’s dye on paper, three layers of dye.

It’s not taught in schools and only a handful of people know how to do it. I can give another example of a modern but unavailable process. I have a collector friend who recently bought a Richard Misrach photograph. It is gorgeous, but it is a laminated process that is no longer being done, so if she wants that piece replaced, she could never have it done exactly the way it was. If he did replace it, it would be a different look. So that changes the way the collector interprets that photograph.

Where and with what are the large-scale color photographs signed?

Nowadays, since most contemporary photographs are large, they are mounted to a rigid material, either aluminum, Plexiglas, Dibond, or Sintra. Our artists have studio stickers that have all of the print information and their signature on the back. I usually encourage the sticker because it’s a piece of paper. And it’s signed with archival ink. Some people will sign with a Sharpie on the back of the aluminum itself, which is perfectly fine too. It will never come off.

What Martin Schoeller uses is sort of a debossing stamp and he signs over the debossing. Michael Thompson does that also. I encourage that as well because I think that ‘s impossible to mimic or replicate. So there’s a nice level of insurance there.

Do you think there’s much technical possibility of forgery with a wall-size color photograph?

I don’t think so. I think it would be impossible and horribly expensive.

What would be the qualities that said “forgery” to you?

If it is an artist you represent, it should be obvious. Everyone prints differently. Signatures are necessary with contemporary work, one should know each artist’s signature and studio stamp. I truly can’t imagine anyone trying to replicate an Andreas Gefeller — it would be insane! I always encourage everybody to do his or her research. Buy it from a reputable dealer, somebody that you know.

If you’re buying at auction, then I would research the artist to see if he or she has representation and if there is an edition number. I know the location of the work and where it goes — if it comes up for auction. This is why galleries are so important, because we can decipher the signatures and the original print quality. In the case of vintage photographs, you should always work with someone who knows what they are doing. Having knowledge of the history of photography is crucial.

In regard to charity auctions, let’s say an artist has two or three artists’ proofs and he can do whatever he wants to with them. A charity says please give us this for an auction, and he does. And the piece goes for a thousand dollars but his retail is $30,000. What, if any, impact does that have on the marketplace?

Usually the charity is for a good cause. If the person got the piece for a thousand dollars, kudos, they got a great deal. But if the work retails for $30,000, chances are that it wouldn’t be donated to a charity event, and if it were, a reserve would be set. It must sell at the reserve — at least — otherwise it doesn’t benefit the organization. It’s important that the auction be beneficial to the organization, to the artist, and to the person who did the bidding. Chances are the piece is not actually an AP. Usually I don’t encourage the artist to donate an AP, because those are the pieces that are going to have a nest-egg quality.

Let’s speak of major auction houses like Sotheby’s and Christie’s. If a Paolo Ventura piece selling for, let’s say, $20,000 were put up at a major auction house and it went for $5,000, would your collectors get hysterical?

Yes. This is something that I have to control. The work must have a reserve, which is typically a realistic amount; in the above case it would not be $5,000. We try to pay attention to the artworks that are coming up at auction and we call the clients who are interested. If it’s a work that’s sold out, and I don’t have it for sale any more, I am calling the people on my wish list who wanted it and saying, it’s coming up for sale at Sotheby’s, you should get it. Usually there’s more than one person so those two end up duking it out and it ends up selling for more. Resale at auction doesn’t benefit me financially, but it benefits the auction house and it benefits the person who is purchasing the work. It also benefits the artist because it sells. So it’s very, very important that I know that the art works are coming up. So we work very closely with the auction houses in that regard. I like and respect all of them. I think that they do a really tough job.

How do you see the marketplace at the time of this interview, in relation to the weak dollar and what is being called a recession?

It’s a question I’ve been getting a lot. I have to say, knock on wood, “We’re doing great.” I think the reason our gallery in particular seems to be weathering any storm is that we have a clientele that is perhaps not being affected as much by the economy as some other sectors. As well, at HASTED HUNT, we sort of think outside the box — we just curated a show for Beijing, for example. It will be shown in conjunction with the Olympics and it just so happens that the entire show was purchased. So that saves any kind of slow summer traffic. The art fairs are also a great way to sell work. We have had a real nice, consistent influx of clients and new clients and, thank God, everything seems to be fine with our gallery and with our colleagues. We hope it continues. Bill Hunt and I are not aggressive sales people and I think our clients appreciate that, and we sell artists who have nice careers and everything is pretty solid.

Speaking of the vintage market, or even the contemporary market, are there pockets that you think are undervalued financially and that you might advise the collector to consider purchasing?

More genres than anything else. I would say fashion photography is still undervalued, underrated, both contemporary and vintage. Somebody like Lillian Bassman is just fantastic. She is a terrific photographer. A lot of people still don’t know who she is. A contemporary who’s up-and-coming, for example, is Michael Thompson, who was Irving Penn’s assistant for a few years and is now a hugely successful photographer represented commercially by Jed Root. HASTED HUNT debuted his work at our gallery earlier this year. He is terrific. His work has been influenced by the fashion industry but I wouldn’t say it is fashion photography. The other pocket that I think of is photojournalism. Because we started the gallery with a show by the photographers from the Agency VII, some people thought that we were a photojournalism gallery. And I said, “No, no, no, no.” Photojournalism is a very small part of our programming. Bill Hunt and I think that a great photograph is a great photograph, no matter what genre or style.

What has changed over the years?

I think that what’s changed in the past ten years is that the collector is almost as invested in the artist’s career as in the artwork. I’ve noticed over the past ten years that the collectors enjoy the dynamic of seeing the artist succeed. Not because they want to sell their picture, but because of the participation aspect. That’s fun for me because the relationship between the artist and the client is what brings true joy to the job, and reminds you of why you do it. It’s not just selling pictures. It’s an experience we’re all going through together.

What are some of the main pitfalls you’ve seen collectors fall into?

I think a pitfall that collectors might fall into is buying pictures that they don’t love. If you’re buying it for investment and you say OK, I don’t really love this picture but I know it’s going to sell for $300,000 down the road one day, then you should get it. That represents your business savvy and it’s something you think is a wise investment. But if you’re going to live with the picture, I think you should always buy the work that makes you happy, even if it means that it’s an artist who’s never going to have a huge career. That’s very, very important and I think that people don’t put as much value on that as they should. A picture doesn’t have to cost a lot to be important to you.

When a new artist is coming to you and you’re advising him on things like editioning, how do you calculate a beginning price?

Well, there is a thing called “fair market value.” So you base it on the artist’s contemporaries, someone represented by my gallery or another gallery, someone with a comparable career. I teach and I always tell my students you should get it out there into the world. No one knows who you are, so you need to declare your editions, figure out the cost of making the work, double that price, and just get it out there. Sell it to your aunt. But try to get it out there.

I think students make huge mistakes by overpricing their work right out of the gate. It is really, really important that people start to know who you are, because somebody will see it at a friend’s house and they’ll call you and say I love this picture, do you have more? Then you start to sell more. So you have to promote yourself.

In a gallery like this, how many core collectors do you have?

That is hard to say — this is a whole different ball game. The clients we have range from some of the most important photography collectors in the U.S. to some of the famous contemporary art collectors in the world. Even the client who is just beginning is part of our core. Every client is important to our gallery and I have spent 23 years consulting — building collections, placing works in museums — I consider all of it crucial and integral to the success of any gallery.

Now, the large color pictures have been a major trend for how long — 20 years?

Not as long as 20 years. Maybe more like ten. Fifteen maximum.

Do you see other trends emerging?

That question comes up periodically. I don’t. I think there was a trend for a while of people photographing their family. That was a genre for a lot of photographers who were coming out of Yale; it was an aesthetic. I think it’s still going on, but it’s not as evident. I don’t see any trends on the horizon.

Is it possible to pinpoint a moment when this type of extremely large picture became a big thing on the marketplace?

I can’t say when it started. The pictures just kept getting bigger and bigger and bigger. I do tell my students that it’s not necessary for the photograph to be big to be great. The size of the picture needs to match the aesthetic of the work. If they’re just making big pictures to make big pictures, I’m with that curator I mentioned earlier: I think it’s pretty wallpaper.

It doesn’t mean that it isn’t well done or accomplished, it just means that it doesn’t  hold enough weight for me. But I don’t know when the large size started. I think that photographers like Richard Prince had a lot to do with the big color picture. Jeff Koons, Thomas Struth, Cindy Sherman — definitely Cindy Sherman. She went from the film stills to the self-portrait. They’re not huge; her photographs aren’t big compared to the contemporary work of Andreas Gursky. But they were big-ger compared to many earlier photographs. Andres Serrano also had a lot to do with big color pictures.

On the subject of provenance, it sounds as if the marketplace, combined with the internet, is making it very easy to track the provenance of the contemporary photographers.

Yes, provenance is really crucial. I really think it’s important to know where the artwork is coming from. Someone was sort of bemoaning the fact that they bought a piece that turned out to be a reproduction, and I said you should have done the research. Where did it come from?Make a couple of phone calls. Provenance is really, really important. Sometimes I’m asked for a letter of provenance or authentication and I’m happy to give it to the client. It says this is produced by the artist and sold by our gallery, signed by both owners. It’s a piece of paper that is honored. In this business if you don’t function with integrity and honor you shouldn’t be in it.

What would you say are the differences among European collectors and Latin American collectors and American collectors? What does each group gravitate toward?

That is a tough one. It’s across the board. I think it used to be more predictable that Europeans would buy something more striking, fashion-y, something a little sleeker. But I don’t think that’s the case anymore. You know there are huge art markets in Europe right now: Berlin in Germany; Italy’s up and coming. I think that they’re a very sophisticated audience. It is the same as in America.

Is New York still the center of the art world, particularly the photography world?

Absolutely. I would say that if you’re an artist and you want to be a successful artist — I mean successful in that you want to have a grand career — you must have a career in New York. I wouldn’t have said that before I moved here.  Maybe I would have said it without much believing it, but it is definitely the case. It is a competitive art market, it is a savvy art market, it is a tough art market to penetrate, but if you can you will have a distinct advantage. It is without a doubt the one to conquer.  Owning an art gallery in New York also presents unique challenges, but I would not have my own gallery anywhere else.

What are some of the challenges?

The challenges are you want to stay current, interesting and noticed, you want to get attention, and you want to sell. There are so many artists in such a small space and so many galleries, you have to be good.

Sometimes you and Bill have slightly contradictory answers, which is healthy.

I do think that contradiction is healthy. I think that sometimes Bill will come at a question with the collector’s mind and I’ll come at it with the gallerist’s mind. Those don’t always connect. The funny thing is, with the face-mounted plexi, I don’t think it’s as much of an archival pain in the behind as he does. I think it has a certain aesthetic. As a collector, if I traveled my collection, then I would see it as a nightmare, but since the pictures stay on my wall, I’m fine with it.

Also I don’t think Bill has as much technical insight about processes and how things are produced because he wasn’t trained as a photographer. I think that he says, I love that picture. Great, I don’t really care about the technical aspects. So he approaches it from a strictly aesthetic point of view. Meanwhile I’m saying, well, that print is a little green for me and maybe the whites could be whiter; maybe it should be reprinted. So I’m looking at the quality of the printing and he has this gut reaction to the image. I am heavy-duty quality control. And he is, too, but I don’t think he knows how to verbalize it. For the most part, the interesting thing about us is that we agree on so many things. When we curate a show, maybe there’s a difference of one or two pictures.

Do the photographers listen to you?

Absolutely. I never tell an artist how to make a picture. I would never go down that road. The artist will bring the images to me and I might say I think this one is stronger or I need time for this one to grow on me. I will be honest if something isn’t working. I will tell them that their printing process is too dull, that it’s not as good as it could be. I will say I think you should try a different process, you know, maybe a C-print would be better, etc. So you are a little bit of a mentor and it’s a relationship and it’s really important to keep an open mind when you’re dealing with things like this. I would like the artist to figure out the framing.

The final presentation should be in the forefront of his or her mind, because it’s going to be the longevity of this piece. Maybe it gets changed but this is how the artist prefers it. In a perfect world I would love for those decisions to be made without me. If I think it’s something that could be better, I will make a suggestion. So there are different considerations, but the artists do listen to me. We are on this journey together.

What do you think are the qualities that make HASTED HUNT stand out?

I think HASTED HUNT is unique in many ways. First, Bill Hunt and I truly enjoy what we do: the quality of our business and our lives is a priority. We want to be friendly, helpful, and knowledgeable — as well as successful.

The programming at HASTED HUNT definitely reflects our personal taste, which will always make a gallery unique. Bill and I don’t feel the need to represent every trend or style of photography. We want to represent and build the careers of artists we believe in and who will be in the art world for a very long time. 

Our collectors and clients value our opinions so it is our obligation to be experts in our field. With our combined experience and background, I believe that we are.