Photography Collection

The Dorotheum will sell b/w photographs at an auction in Vienna, Austria. Top lots are a motion study by Rudolf Koppitz, ca. 1925 and a series by Eadward Muybridge who photographed a running baboon. Most pictures are from the 19.th e.g. a Florence cathedral by the Fratelli Alinari and the early 20th century. A collector offers a modern print (2008) by Jock Sturges: Nude, c-print off Polaroid.

Art follows commerce, and connoisseurship follows art. Amsterdam and New York became centers of art making only after locals earned fortunes. Ars gratia artis ("art for art’s sake") has its defenders, but it makes for a bad business model and for artists with permanent day jobs—as servitors for locals striving to earn fortunes. And who, however lofty one’s aesthetic ideals, wants to be the only one in town not making money? On the trail of the artists who come on the trail of the businessmen and bankers come the gallery owners. They may legitimately believe in the transformative power of art, but to hear them speak in sidebars at auction houses and at arts fairs is to hear art spoken of as a commodity: "I let Miriam have the run of the back room before the show, and she grabbed the Damien Hirst; I moved both Warhols and a Larry Rivers the first evening…"
In the first century and change since its invention, photography rarely suffered from such utilitarian but necessary degradations by art vendors because it was not considered a proper art, much in the way that novels were enjoyed but were not considered true literature for a long time after their popularity had been secured. The topic is one of debate, but it is possible to look to 1969, the year of the opening of the Witkin Gallery in New York, as the decisive turn that took photography on the road to acceptance as collectible art. There were informal rules: black & white only, please. Prices were denominated in the hundreds of dollars, in the main, but it was all quite an advance for a medium long held in suspicion because of its dependence on a mechanical device used by nearly everyone. Even now, there are purists who insist that, if a camera can make art, so can a can opener.
"Fine-art photography" had come of age aesthetically long before: in the 1920s, when it generally stopped trying to look like Impressionist painting and found its own visual "grammar," to borrow a phrase from music that music borrowed from writing. Different schools developed, but they were united in the idea that a photograph can be art and that an art photograph is a revelation of visual truth, abstracted into monochrome and two dimensions. Photography had a few relatively secluded decades to set its own aesthetic standards and to develop a collective oeuvre. On the business side, the major auction houses began trading in photographic prints—about as sure a sign of mainstream acceptance as an avant-garde actor earning his own TV series. Gradations of value were assigned not merely by virtue of edition numbering, as with other forms of printmaking, but by the distance in time from negative to print, with vintage prints—those made at or near the time of the exposure of the negative—being the most valuable. (A "vintage print" has been defined as one made by the photographer before he learned how to print properly, and it is frequently the case that later prints, made with the benefit of hindsight and better technology, are not only far cheaper than earlier ones but also vastly superior in quality.) In a medium in which blow-ups can be large or small, when it comes to value, size matters, with price going up somewhat in proportion to print size.
The community of galleries that developed around the embrace of photography as art was a committed core, roughly divided among: (a) those with an eye toward pioneering works in shades of sepia created in the nineteenth century; (b) sellers of the twin classical movements of the twentieth-century: "street" photography brought to fruition, most notably in the USA and France, by the introduction of the Leica 35mm camera, and the big-negative, detail-rich works in rugged shades of black and gray made by Group f/64; and (c) the brave and the few willing to support contemporary photography, including (at long last) color works. For a modern medium, photography quickly settled into a period of classicism, with many of its old masters still alive and with the most rare and sought-after photographic prints trading in the thousands and even tens of thousands of dollars. And so rested the photography market, the engine humming at idle, watching with incredulity as the market for contemporary art in all media began a race from rationality. There are a number of reasons why that happened, but the simplest is that, just as art follows money, new art follows new money. With many good works by the great dead of art history already in museums and private collections, contemporary art represented open, unharvested ground. And if you are new at collecting, it is easy to get caught in the spectacle of it all: organizers of art fairs such as Art Basel Miami and TEFAF Maastricht boast about the number of private planes visiting their annual events. Contemporary artists are conveniently yet among the living, so there is fun in meeting them, and because they are alive, they have designated galleries that represent them, forming a network of relationships based on money, parties and general comradery. And the fact that you don’t really have to have studied or know much about the history of art to collect what’s new in art can’t be underestimated; you may have plenty of quiet time on your private jet to read Jacob Burkhardt or Kenneth Clark on Titian or van Dyck, but who would entertain the guests you’ve brought along to watch you spend $100,000 for a canvas by a promising twenty-eight-year-old from Yunnan Province or Macon County?
Around the turn of this century, word started filtering out of Paris that photography was just another medium of contemporary art. That could mean only one thing: contemporary photography was undervalued. For a once non-art that now not only has its old masters but traditional business practices, it has been rather a shock. Just as it now proves possible to pay more for a Jeff Koons than a Corot or for a Cy Twombly than a Rembrandt, Andreas Gursky, as the current record holder for the most expensive photograph ever taken (a color image of a discount store that went earlier this year for $3.3 million), apparently can sell one photograph for more than a museum full of old master photographers. Naturally, that will have a trickle-down effect: as with so many photographers who exhibit today, I can only say that, so appalled was I on hearing the first reports of the Gursky excess, I was moved to call my gallery and raise my own prices.
The new grammar of photography as contemporary art owes something to the earlier rise of photorealism: photography again imitating painting, only this time it is imitating painting that imitates or at least references photography. The new photography is often a seemingly incongruous blend of artifice and literalism that, as with all incongruities in art, occasionally produces sheer brilliance and mostly produces piles of high kitsch, meaning fine art that aspires toward resonance but accomplishes only easy sensation. In contemporary art, the common result is merely a cheap thrill. The problem with any newly minted kitsch is that you don’t know it when you see it; because it is so new, it even passes for cool. Victorians didn’t know the academic paintings they bought for their parlors were kitsch; they thought the art was quite in the mode, which it was. It’s always left to later generations to tell us that we were idiots to think the art of our time delivered so much more than it did.

As in years past, spring in New York brought major photography exhibitions at city museums, annual dealer fairs at the Seventh Regiment Armory, and the semi-annual photography auctions at the major houses. At The Museum of Modern Art, the Jeff Wall exhibition was attracting considerable notice. Wall is one of the photographers who have walked the bridge from photography to contemporary art; indeed, on its website page for the exhibition, MoMA upgraded his status from "photographer" to "artist." Wall’s works are large-format images, lighted from behind in light box format, of scenes staged by Wall—scenes inhabited by the stylized, illusory reality of cinema. When Wall wanted to photograph people waiting to get into a Vancouver nightclub, he had the club’s façade built in his studio, then separately captured and digitally assembled the pieces. In Wall’s photography, expression works according to plan, as in painting, making it the polar opposite to street photography (a bad term now supplanted by a worse one: "documentary" photography). The very point of documentary photography is that the photographer has revealed and ultimately interpreted a found, authentic event in a blink of an eye—that is (to use the famous phrase of Henri Cartier-Bresson), in the "decisive moment."
The fact that Wall, while alive and healthy, gets about one million dollars for a meticulously planned image and that late prints of iconic Henri Cartier-Bresson photographs have soared since the master’s death in 2004 from $4,500 to about $18,000 gives a hint of the upside down world that the photography market has become. It was only a few years ago that the photographic world tittered with indignation at the news that Robert Doisneau’s famous The Kiss by the Hôtel de Ville (1950)—an image of a couple in full-bore smooch while the street life of Paris raced unnoticed around them—was not a decisive moment but a staged event, done with paid models. General indignation came from a sense of being cheated, of the photographer not having played fair under the rules of the game as then written. So faithfully did collectors believe in those rules, no one seemed to notice, despite the passage of decades, that the same models are apparently the couple seen kissing in another popular Doisneau image, Square du Vert-Galant (1950). Doisneau, even in death, does not command one million dollars for a print; he died (in 1994) a photographer, not an artist.

At the Works on Paper show at the armory this season, photography was treated like any other art made on fiber. A Swedish gallery was profiling the large photographs of a friend of a friend; I’d remembered the photographer from a Park Avenue party as both engaging and charming, but on display here was a self portrait showing her seated, one breast exposed, enthusiastically masturbating. Contemporary content is about nothing if not shock and self-absorption, and as I’ve demonstrated on these pages before, I support female autoeroticism in all its forms. More particularly, I wrote favorably about Christian Schad’s Two Girls (1928), executed in oil on canvas; the photograph, however, showed why the grammar of painting and photography split early on: what passes as inventive, profound and even lyrical in painting will, due to the literalism of the camera as a recording device, come across as crass and undignified in photography. I won’t say more about it because I believe the photographer has good work ahead of her, and because we all have our lapses and have bills to pay. The Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD) also held its annual show at the armory, following close upon Works on Paper. "There has been a big collision with contemporary art, and we’re trying to untangle it after it some got welded together on impact," said Burt Finger of Photographs Do Not Bend Gallery, which has just moved to a new location in Dallas. "It’s getting hard to tell the photographers from the painters without a catalogue," he added. "The prices are outrageous because we have collided with the art market we have taken on a bit of the luster of the art market—for good or bad, I don't know."
Peter Fetterman, who has an airy, eponymous gallery in Santa Monica, had also participated in Works on Paper and is well known for supporting decisive-moment photographers such as Henri Cartier-Bresson and Sebastião Salgado. "It’s a booming market, isn’t it?" he said. "I think the whole of the photography market is exploding," with the effect that his segment of the market was benefiting from the collision of the new photography with contemporary art. However, he immediately added a note of caution: "I think the contemporary segment of the market is playing roulette. You have to ask which of these artists will have longevity and I'm a little disturbed by that. Some of these people are just out of photo school but are extremely hyped up," which is why, whatever the temptations presented by the new, Mr. Fetterman is sticking with the old masters and with living exponents of decisive-moment photography such as Salgado and Elliott Erwitt. At his booth in a far corner, my fellow New Orleanian Joshua Mann Pailet, whose relaxed French Quarter gallery I’d recently visited, now added, "We’re drawing a bigger audience. Serious collectors are coming from other disciplines these days, such as painting; there is definitely a lot of drift and it’s affecting prices."
I’d not heard of Mona Kuhn before, but I counted at least three galleries showing her big color prints of good-looking young people at a nudist colony in France. I’d also not heard of Steven Klein, but Wessel + O’Connor Fine Art of Brooklyn carried his series showing a set of Clairol-blond German triplets and the fashion designer Tom Ford in various tableaux. The most intriguing of the series had Mr. Ford preparing to buff the bare backside one of the three with an electric furniture polisher while his brothers held him by the arms and legs, presumably burning with sibling jealousy over not sharing the experience. That picture brought a bit of artspeak from a gallery representative—about how the artist is providing commentary on the relationship between celebrity and reality in contemporary society. Because I don’t care all that much for explanations, I was quite content to read the image as: "There is Tom Ford, dressed in a nicely tailored suit, buffing a German’s bare ass." The very fact that an explanation was deemed necessary, however, shows one of the problems arising from the painful transition from photography to contemporary art: until now, photography has never required an explanation to be understood. Everyone "gets" a good photograph—the cognoscenti simply get it at a higher, more complex level. Much contemporary visual art, in contrast, fails as art without the buttress of verbal or written explanation.
To illustrate: some years ago, the Whitney Museum had an exhibition of Robert Mapplethorpe photographs. Whether it was a picture of an aircraft carrier at sea or rank homoerotic pornography, everyone who came to the exhibition understood what he was seeing. In contrast, I once latched onto a tour given at one of the museum’s sometimes-tortuous biennial reviews of American art. The docent took us to what looked like a rack of dishtowels made of plastic. The more our narrator talked, explaining the artist’s methods, intentions and Weltanschauung, the more the dishtowels grew into art. As soon as the docent left, however, the part of what I was looking at that was art picked up and trailed behind him, leaving me to stare once more at dishtowels. It was in part from that experience that I’ve developed Behr’s First Law of Contemporary Art: to be art, a work must be art independent of commentary. That is, if a piece needs to be explained in order to be understood by a reasonably sophisticated audience, it isn’t art. The contagion of required explanation has now passed to photography in its celebration as contemporary art—and it is likely to continue to spread, carried by the parasite of overpricing.
Unfortunately for me, I suppose, I’m strictly old school in my working habits: I shoulder camera and lens, stick some black & white film into a pocket (digital capture isn’t quite there yet), and off I go, preferably around New York City or Paris—the world’s two best cities for revealing the human comedy. I work from that faith that spurs on all decisive-moment photographers: the images are always there; if you don’t bring back interesting photographs, it’s because you’ve not been open to finding them. I continue to gain warm satisfaction from having never shown a sophisticated person a photograph and have him respond, "What does that mean, exactly?"
In all eras, all thinking men and women remember how much better things were when they were young; in truth, we only delude ourselves into believing that life was better back then, when it is youth itself that we miss. Yet I can fondly recall the time that, while I was still in college, I asked Ansel Adams what it would cost for a print of his incomparable Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, California (1944); he answered it came in two sizes, for $300 and $500 respectively. My mother stepped in to remind me that both trust funds on which I depended for support were compellingly underfunded. I reflect on that missed opportunity each time I see the current auction estimates of later prints of the image, which run in the $30,000 to $50,000 range, but when you consider how far south of one million dollars you need spend for a masterpiece by an old master of the medium, we classicists can still take heart.

Alan Behr contributed to the Postcards from Paris show at Leica Gallery in New York in 2007. Based in New York, he writes on art and photography for Culturekiosque.com .

Even the financial crisis hit the art market of photography only to a moderate extent. Experts assume that buying art is used for money laundering as Europe and the US fight against tax shelters. So e.g. photography and paintings can be kept in special storage rooms in Switzerland according to the Sueddeutsche Zeitung without being checked by customs officials.

Miles Aldridge’s images depict a stupendously glossy and magnetically vibrant world with ultra slick, hyper-lit models and signature acid tones. Standing out among contemporary fashion and figurative photography for its luminous composition and for the mysterious situations he has created, these aspects of his practice both derive and simultaneously depart from the work of artists which Hamiltons has represented over the decades, including Horst, Penn and Avedon. Cinematic expression marks Aldridge’s work and it is not surprising therefore that his dreamlike, erotic style has drawn comparisons with the work of Bergman, Dali, David Lynch, Hitchcock and Godard amongst others.
‘If the world were pretty enough, I’d shoot on location all the time. But the world is just not being designed with aesthetics as a priority. So I prefer to rebuild it instead of photographing the real one. What I’m trying to do is take something from real life and reconstruct it in a cinematic way.’ Aldridge goes on to say ‘That’s why an hour and a half of an Antonioni movie is so much more interesting to me than an hour and a half of real life. Because it’s condensed emotion, condensed colour, condensed light.’ Whilst his father, the art director Alan Aldridge, was designing artwork for the Beatles, Aldridge was being collected from school by Eric Clapton and photographed by Lord Snowdon. Arguably, he was destined for an artistic life having grown up surrounded by pop art, rock music and amongst his father’s accomplices; legends such as Elton John, David Bailey and Eduardo Paolozzi. Having studied at London’s Central Saint Martins, Aldridge dabbled in illustration and making music videos before becoming a photographer; and within a few years he was working for W, Vogue and The Face as well as Paul Smith, YSL and Giorgio Armani.
‘Aldridge is a dream technician of a high order. Just when the term post-modernism seems quite tired, he gives it a boost by working the line of contradiction with rigor and verve. Aldridge understands that in the post-surrealist world, the world where surreality is reality, there is no strict demarcation between dream and reality, art and commerce, art and fashion, secular and religious, male and female, master and pet, past and present, I and thou. It is, as we like to say now, what it is. It is what it is. All is one.’ Glenn O’Brien, Acid Candy, 2008. Aldridge, born in 1964, lives and works in London. His work has been exhibited internationally in both solo and group exhibitions with pieces residing in many significant public and private collections. Aldridge has published several books of photographs, most recently: The Cabinet, 2007, with an introduction by Marilyn Manson and Acid Candy, 2008, with an introduction by Glenn O’Brien. Miles Aldridge: Pictures for Photographs will be published by Steidl in Spring 2009.

In 1997, Blake Fitch began documenting the lives of her half-sister, Kate, and their cousin, Julia, as they grew from adolescent girls into young women. All of the photographs center on two distinct locales—the home of Fitch’s well-heeled grandparents and the other her family’s
summer residence on Round Island in the Thousand Islands region of upstate New York on the St. Lawrence River. The artist writes that the project records “the lives of two girls during their sometime-awkward evolution from adolescence to womanhood, and captures the simple moments in their search for their own identities.” Critic, Andy Grunberg, observes, “It is rare
in contemporary photography to encounter a series of pictures this beautiful, compelling,
innocent, and intriguing.” He explains, as young relations to Fitch, Kate and Julia make themselves fully available to the camera, so that there is nothing artificial or cosmetic in the manner in which they present themselves for our interrogation. We are allowed to watch as Fitch’s protagonists discover themselves and eventually establish their own personalities. As curator, Alison Nördstrom, comments, there is a bittersweet pathos in these images, but what the series ultimately asserts is the undeniable strength and power of these young girls. Nördstrom writes, “They are not blank slates or passive innocents. They are brave, present, active, and aware—they look us in the eye unflinchingly.” Blake Fitch’s work is represented in the permanent collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the George Eastman House, Rochester, New York; the Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts; and the Danforth Museum, Framingham, Massachusetts; among others.

By Andy Grundberg
It is rare in contemporary photography to encounter a series of pictures this beautiful, compelling, innocent, and intriguing. That they should come from someone who has spent much of her career devoting herself to promoting the talents of others makes them even more special. I feel as if Blake Fitch, whom I first met when she was the director of the Griffin Museum of Photography in Winchester, Massachusetts, has snuck up behind us and delivered a classic Zen slap. The photographs are the result of a ten-year project during which Fitch portrayed the growth from early adolescence into adulthood of her half-sister, Kate, and their cousin, Julia. The girls, now young women, are the same age, and fifteen years younger than the photographer. The first photographs show them at age 12, the most recent at 22. They are, in a dual sense, perfect subjects: blessed with impeccable genes and unmarked by the tribulations of life, they have the beauty of a Bronzino or Botticelli, and as young relations to Fitch they make themselves fully available to the camera. One has the sense that nothing is artificial in the way they present themselves to our interrogation, or cosmetic.

Blake Fitch, “Julia on Thanksgiving,” 2004, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

Alison Nordstrom has written sagely (in Lightwork 142) about the quality of the girls’ gaze, which functions as a register of their self-consciousness and self-confidence. In pictures like “Girls in Bathroom” (1997) and “Kate Putting on Makeup” (1998), their young eyes are elsewhere than with us, suggesting interiority and self-protection. “Katie at Window” and “Katie in Red Towel” (both 1997) precociously speak otherwise; Katie/Kate confronts us as ably and disconcertingly as in her incarnation nine years later as the dauntingly sensual “Katie in Orange Bikini.” More to the point, perhaps, is that in all these exquisitely composed earlier images the protagonists appear to be costumed, to be trying on their clothes as if trying on their own identities. Ten years is a long time in any life, but the ten years from childhood to adulthood are an eon. Just look at what age hath wrought for Julia in the interlude from “Julia in the Flower Room, 1997” to “Julia on Christmas Eve, 2005.” Something similar can be seen in tracing Kate from “Katie in Middle of Backyard, 1997” to “Kate on Back Path at River, 2006.” One imagines that a sculptor has worked away on a blank of stone and carved out cheekbones, defined chins and breasts, added individualized expressions. As they age, they differentiate: the girls look nearly identical, but the young women in their twenties are clearly distinct.

Blake Fitch, “Kate and Emily in Yellow Hallway,” 2006, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

This chrysalis-to-imago metamorphosis is most apparent, naturally enough, in images that show
more of the cousins’ growing bodies than the puritanical guardians of our nation’s family values might care to countenance. Not to worry: most MySpace pages have more prurient interest than these. At the same time, one cannot deny that the bathing suits and underwear on view allow flesh to be displayed as a signifier of incipient womanhood and thus potential sexuality. Adolescence, lest we forget, is defined both scientifically and behaviorally by the onset of hormones, which are the real sculptors at work on the young human body. Focusing on the subject of adolescence as it presents itself visually is not without peril, and it is not without precedent in today’s art world. Photographers as accomplished as Sally Mann and Rineke Dijkstra, not to mention Hellen van Meene, Kelli Connell, Lise Sarfati and others, have based their careers on photographing children in the process of growing up. For instance, Mann depicted girls on the cusp of adolescence in her series “At Twelve,” then moved on to her own two girls, as well as her son, picturing them from early childhood on. Dijkstra has photographed
teen-agers on beaches, videotaped them dancing at rock clubs, and followed specific individuals into adulthood by photographing them annually. Fitch acknowledges a debt to Mann and Dijkstra’s example, as well as to the work of Tina Barney, whose pictures combine elegant interiors with docudramas starring her family and friends. (Looking at the backgrounds of Fitch’s pictures is a pleasure worthy of a separate essay.)

Blake Fitch, “Kate in Red Towel,” 1997, Courtesy of ClampArt, New York City

What separates Fitch from these artists is her work’s concentrated focus, its autobiographical character, and its refusal, as presented here, to obey straightforward chronology. Turning the pages is like bouncing back and forth in time, as if a family album’s worth of pictures had fallen on the floor and the prints forever scrambled. The effect is disconcerting, which helps focus attention on how much integrity and ingenuity each of these pictures has. When I first encountered Fitch’s images I imagined that she had photographed a number of adolescent girls, although I admit being struck by how similar they were in aggregate. Frankly, it was a surprise to learn that all the characters in this photographic array boil down to two people. Not only two people, but two female relations to whom she is closely tied and whose childhoods seem to embody an ideal Fitch may feel was denied her. (The artist’s parents split up when she was a young girl, and she was uprooted from Rochester, N.Y., to North Carolina as a result.) The settings of the photographs are equally restricted in number: all were taken either at Fitch’s grandparents’ home in Rochester, or in and around the family summer home in the Thousand Islands, on the St. Lawrence River. One can envy the classic lacquered speedboat, the vintage wooden dock, the bright upholstery and warm furniture inside the house, and see in them a parable of languid affluence. White? Yes. Anglo-Saxon? Apparently. Protestant? Check. Or one could better read them as signs of desire – not of the consumer but the psychological kind. The comfortable settings in which Kate and Julia compose themselves are comforting precisely because they speak of tradition and heritage and continuity. This is both a blessing and the burden the now-young women will bear, just as the photographer does: they must measure the passage of their lives with the help of pictures, since the world they share seems to exist outside of time. As with Mann’s work, Fitch’s project can be judged a felicitous fiction, a recreation of an edenic upbringing that cannot quite be believed nor authoritatively denied. Yet its documentary
trappings are so convincing that only a hardened skeptic would want to know if Fitch chose the dresses or planned the poses. So we are left with a mystery, photographically speaking, that in the best case adds to our comprehension of another mystery, which is what growing up turns out to be. I am not sure this is what Blake Fitch intended, but I am confident that this is what she has accomplished.

Christie’s New York will showcase a broad range of photographs from the early 20th century through to the present day at the end of march. Highlights include important photographs, all from private collections worldwide, by artists such as Helmut Newton, Irving Penn, Robert Mapplethorpe, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Richard Avedon, Baron Adolph de Meyer, Ansel Adams, Bernd and Hilla Becher, William Eggleston and Shirin Neshat. Overall, the sale comprises 116 lots with a projected sale total of $3 million.

Helmut Newton: Photographs from the Collection of Leon Constantiner: Third and Final Part
The final selection from the extraordinary Constantiner collection underscores Helmut Newton’s ascension to the position of one of the most sought-after photographers in the current market. In December 2008, Christie’s New York held Part I of this Newtonled collection, which totaled over $7.7 million and established the world auction record for a work by the artist. The March 31st sale will open with twenty classic works by Newton. His diverse, often mischievous fashion nude and landscape studies are all represented in the selection, a highlight of which is the Big Nude I: Lisa, Paris, (estimate: $25,000-35,000) . Estimates for the group range from $4,000-$60,000.

Various Owners
The meticulous work of Robert Mapplethorpe is well-represented in the sale, including two versions of his beautiful, highly decorative, Calla Lily, 1988 (estimates: $100,000-150,000 and $40,000-60,000 respectively) and an important, complete set of four images of Ajitto, 1981 (estimate: $120,000-180,000) – pictured right, a favorite model of the artist. These four images were a gift from the artist to their original owner. As a homogenous group, not collected piecemeal, they are extremely rare. A complete set of Ajitto has not been offered at auction in almost 20 years. Christie’s will sell fashion photography and, accordingly, will offer a number of significant works from various New York private collections. Important examples include the Harlequin Dress, 1950 (estimate: $150,000-250,000), Irving Penn’s graphic homage to his wife and muse Lisa Fonssagrives-Penn and his sublimely understated Handkerchief Glove (Dior), Paris also from 1950 (estimate: $25,000-35,000). The sale also includes two very different prints of Richard Avedon’s timeless Dovima with Elephants – pictured left, and Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, 1955 (estimate: $70,000-90,000 and $30,000-50,000 respectively), as well as Herbs Ritts’ complex nude grouping of 1980s supermodels, Stephanie, Cindy, Christy, Tatjana, Naomi, Hollywood, 1989 (estimate: $20,000-30,000). Baron Adolph de Meyer’s extraordinary Portrait of the Marchesa Luisa Casati, 1912 (estimate: $25,000-35,000) fittingly is from the personal collection of Richard Avedon. Casati, a celebrated stylemaker and femme fatale, was one of the most eccentric women of the 20th century, wearing live snakes as jewelry and walking her pet cheetahs through the streets of Venice. Lavish parties, held in her palazzo, were attended by an avant-garde elite such as Jean Cocteau, Man Ray, Giovanni Boldini and Ezra Pound. De Meyer’s remarkable portrait distills the intense charisma of Casati’s personality. The image is extremely rare as the photographer destroyed much of his own work before the war.
The cover lot of the sale is a typically lyrical landscape by Elger Esser, Amboise Frankreich, 2006 (estimate: $25,000-35,000). The photograph is part of a California collection, which also includes several prints by Diane Arbus such as Nudist lady with swan sunglasses, Pa., 1965 (estimate: $12,000-18,000), Albino sword swallower at a carnival, Md, 1970 (estimate: $15,000-25,000) and Man and his girlfriend with hot dogs in the park, NYC, 1971 (estimate: $8,000-12,000). Henri Cartier-Bresson’s Judith Martinez Ortega, Mexico, 1934 is a probably unique print, belied by its very modest estimate ($9,000- 12,000). It formed part of a 1946 scrapbook encapsulating Cartier-Bresson’s best work to date. In 1934, Cartier-Bresson spent several months in Mexico City where he met a number of important artists and patrons, one of whom was writer Judith Martinez Ortega. Cartier-Bresson’s portrayal is a wonderful stylistic blend of surrealism and reportage. The sale offers a strong selection of work across a broad range of themes and periods. For collectors of more traditional landscapes, there are a number of important photographs by Ansel Adams from several private collections, including Portfolio Two, Portfolio IV (both estimated at $70,000-90,000) as well as emblematic single images such as Clearing Winter Storm, 1944 (estimate: $40,000-60,000), Frozen Lake and Cliffs, Sierra Nevada, 1932 and Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico, c. 1941 (estimate: $25,000-35,000). Among the many contemporary artists included in the sale are four stunning, typically stark images by Bernd and Hilla Becher from their Stone Breaker series, 1987-1989 (each print extremely modestly estimated at $9,000-12,000). Equally arresting and typically unsettling is Shirin Neshat’s, Faezeh + Amir Kahn, 2009 (estimate: $50,000-70,000). The life-size image of a solemn young couple with Neshat’s characteristic inclusion of extensive handwritten text – in this case, passages from Shahrnush Parsipour’s novel, Women Without Men – imparts a strong narrative quality to the work.

Auction: Photographs March 31 at 2pm
Viewing: Christie’s Galleries at Rockefeller Center, New York, March 25 -30

By Richard B. Woodward
Paul Graham's 2007 photographic book project, "a shimmer of possibility," was just that: an experiment that tested how documentary-style still images, when carefully edited, provoke in the viewer the kind of narrative associations a reader might experience from a lyric poem or a short story. The literary models for this effort, he said at the time, were Japanese haiku and Chekhov's fiction. Published by Steidl as a series of 12 slim hardcovers, each bound in cloth of a different color, the ambitious project was at once lavish (the set sold for $250) and austere. No descriptions accompanied the pictures except the date and place they were taken. One of the books featured only a single image. The title itself seemed double-edged as well, as if Mr. Graham were unsure if he were leading photographers toward an iridescent dawn or merely preparing an expensive mirage. A selection from "a shimmer of possibility" is now on the walls at the Museum of Modern Art through May 12, and the results are just as tantalizing, if no more definitive. From the 12 Steidl books, the curator Susan Kismaric has chosen about half a dozen and further edited them -- eliminating some images, rearranging others, so that none of the sequences exist here as originally published.
All of the pictures were shot in the U.S. between 2004 and 2006 during more than a dozen road trips undertaken by Mr. Graham from his home in New York. The scenes from California, Louisiana, Nevada, North Dakota and elsewhere are uniformly nondescript and the people anonymous. Nothing suggests the photographer had privileged access to his subjects. They stand, sit, lie down, eat, smoke, play outdoors in spaces open to everyone -- on street corners and sidewalks, along highways, in fast-food parking lots. In one series of eight pictures, a man with an electric mower works a patch of grass back and forth along a stretch of road in Pittsburgh. A sliver of parking lot in the foreground indicates this is not his lawn but a public facility (a motel? a hospital?). Even though mowing grass is depicted here as a sweaty job, this is a man who does it with dedication. Mr. Graham's steady focus discovers a smudge of sun illuminating the man from behind and, in another picture, a sprinkle of rain in the foreground. There is irony in the pleasure gained from these natural epiphanies: They are ours, not his.
In another sequence on another wall, it's dusk in a suburb, which doesn't prevent a teenage boy and girl from playing basketball on the street until dark. Less uplifting are three other series: an expressionless woman eating chicken out of a Styrofoam container; a homeless man stretched out under a window at a Jack-in-the-Box late at night; and an overweight man taking drags on a cigarette outside an apartment complex. In one "story," of a small girl playing with her dolls alone in the grass beside a windowless building, the set of five pictures indicates that Mr. Graham moved in closer with each shot. But in general, as in a series focusing on a small market, he barely moves and lets the customers going in and out and the cars passing in front provide what little visual pizzazz there is. Since appearing at MoMA in 1990 with his countrymen Martin Parr, Graham Smith, John Davies and Chris Killip in "British Photography From the Thatcher Years," the now 53-year-old Mr. Graham has published seven books that attest to an aesthetic in which pictures are found in the world, not made in a studio. Whether or not MoMA intended this new show to be seen as an indirect homage to Robert Frank's book "The Americans," published here in 1959 and being recognized in various 50th-anniversary celebrations, the parallels between the two publishing projects are hard to ignore.

Both men traveled widely around the U.S. and photographed it as foreigners. (Mr. Frank, born 32 years before Mr. Graham, came here from Switzerland.) Neither has claimed to represent the breadth of the country but instead offered highly personal reactions to the American scene. Both trained their lens on the dispossessed -- almost all of Mr. Graham's subjects are from the lower economic rungs -- and both conceived their projects in opposition to photographic trends of their time. Mr. Frank set himself against the lacquered glamour of fashion photography and the moralist simplicity of photojournalism. His book was as open-ended as it was downbeat. Mr. Graham, by reaffirming the values of street photography as perfected by Mr. Frank and others, has rejected the tendency among many artists of his generation to make what he calls the "Great Photograph" -- wall-sized prints designed to overwhelm viewers with their detail, enormousness and summary opinions.
As he told me in a 2007 interview, "photographers have been trying for years to make bodies of work where images work together to build up a coherent statement." One of his models is Robert Adams, who photographs his edge of the American Northwest one tiny piece at a time. "It's not about one great picture by Robert Adams," Mr. Graham said. "It's about 20 or 30 pictures that form a sensitive, intelligent reflection of the world. It's the same with Garry Winogrand or Robert Frank." The ratio of success to failure in "a shimmer of possibility" is not yet equal to that achieved in Mr. Adams's books, much less in Mr. Frank's classic. Mr. Graham has the advantage of digital technology in taking his photographs and editing them on a computer. But his stories seldom evoke the thwarted emotions found in Chekhov. Pictures of the man with the lawn mower are intercut in the book with pictures of canned goods on a store shelf. Apart from conveying a vague sense of poverty in the world, the two sets of pictures cancel rather than reinforce each another.
The effect of Ms. Kismaric's thoughtful edits, many of which clarify sequences found in the books, is to expand the narrative possibilities but also to undermine the overall value of committing the material to paper. If these images can be put together in many different, random ways, why is any one version deserving of special attention? Mr. Graham's focus on America's marginal characters is a welcome corrective to the current art-school practice of students photographing each other and their families. But his objective stance toward his subjects does not absolve him of inadvertent sentimentality, as when his photograph of a man selling flowers on the street invites comparison to the blind girl depicted in Chaplin's "City Lights" -- and the scene isn't any less maudlin if Mr. Graham concentrates on the man's hands and shoots him at night in Las Vegas. A one-volume edition of the 12 books with essays is due out this spring. Perhaps then the full dimensions of Mr. Graham's achievement will be clear. His audacity and intelligence already are.
Mr. Woodward is an arts critic in New York.

More than 70 fine art photography galleries will present a wide range of museum-quality work including contemporary, modern and 19th century photographs, as well as photo-based art, video and new media, at thePark Avenue Armory in New York City. To celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD), this year’s Show will feature a number of special events including two special exhibitions, panel discussions and a lecture. The 30th anniversary exhibition, Innovation, will showcase important works in the history of photography from daguerreotypes to new media. In addition, the Center for the Legacy of Photography (CLP) will show Cause & Effect, an exhibition of vintage photographic prints drawing upon George Eastman House’s extensive collection. A full day of panel discussions on Saturday, March 28, will feature specialists from the art world including Malcolm Daniel, The Metropolitan Museum of Art; Anne E. Havinga, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Charlotte Cotton, Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Vince Aletti, Critic and Curator; and artists and filmmakers including Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, Albert Maysles and Bruce Davidson.

Exhibitors
A wide range of fine art photography galleries will show at the Photography Show. In addition to galleries from New York City and across the country, a number of international galleries will be included from London, Paris, Toronto, Munich, Vienna, Milan, and Buenos Aires:

Nailya Alexander Gallery, New York

Deborah Bell Photographs, New York

Bonni Benrubi Gallery, New York

Galerie Daniel Blau, Munich

Janet Borden, Inc., New York

Stephen Bulger Gallery, Toronto

Robert Burge/20th Century Photos, Ltd., New York

John Cleary Gallery, Houston

Contemporary Works/Vintage Works, Chalfont, PA

Stephen Daiter Gallery, Chicago

David Gallery, Culver City, CA

Danziger Projects, New York

Keith de Lellis Gallery, New York

George Eastman House, Rochester, NY

Catherine Edelman Gallery, Chicago

Gary Edwards Gallery, Washington, DC

Galerie Johannes Faber, Vienna

Henry Feldstein, Forest Hills, NY

Peter Fetterman Gallery, Santa Monica, CA

Foley Gallery, New York

Eric Franck Fine Art, London

A Gallery For Fine Photography, New Orleans

Gitterman Gallery, New York

Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York

HackelBury Fine Art Ltd., London

The Halsted Gallery, Bloomfield Hills, MI

Charles A. Hartman Fine Art, Portland, OR

Hemphill, Washington, DC

Paul M. Hertzmann, Inc., San Francisco

HASTED HUNT LLC, New York

Edwynn Houk Gallery, New York

Hyperion Press Ltd., New York

Charles Isaacs Photographs, Inc., New York

Jackson Fine Art, Atlanta

Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Robert Klein Gallery, Boston

Alan Klotz Gallery, New York

Robert Koch Gallery, San Francisco

Hans P. Kraus, Jr. Inc., New York

Lee Gallery, Winchester, MA

Robert Mann Gallery, New York

Lee Marks Fine Art, Shelbyville, IN

Andrea Meislin Gallery, New York

Robert Miller Gallery, New York

Richard Moore Photographs, Oakland, CA

Scott Nichols Gallery, San Francisco

Gallery 19/21, Boston

Photology, Milan

PDNB Gallery, Dallas

Serge Plantureux, Paris

Yancey Richardson Gallery, New York

Charles Schwartz LTD, New York

Sepia International, New York

William L. Schaeffer/Photographs, Chester, CT

Scheinbaum & Russek Ltd., Santa Fe

Lisa Sette Gallery, Scottsdale, AZ

Michael Shapiro Photography, San Francisco

Bruce Silverstein Gallery, New York

Barry Singer Gallery, Petaluma, CA

Andrew Smith Gallery, Santa Fe

Joel Soroka Gallery, Aspen

Throckmorton Fine Art, New York

Vasari Art Gallery, Buenos Aires

Weston Gallery, Carmel, CA

Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, New York

Winter Works on Paper, Brooklyn

Zabriskie Gallery, New York


Special Exhibitions
To celebrate the 30th anniversary of AIPAD, the fair will present Innovation, a thematic “exhibition within an exhibition.” From daguerreotype to new media, each gallery will show a work that reflects an innovation -- such as a technical or artistic development or a seminal work. In each booth, the work will be identified as an innovation in the history of photography. A complete catalogue of the Innovation special exhibition, including images and wall text, will be available on www.aipad.com. “From its conception, photography was innovative and influenced the way many other art forms evolved,” noted Robert Klein, past President AIPAD, and President, Robert Klein Gallery, Boston. “For example, Eadweard Muybridge's work was the precursor to the moving picture. And the world seen upside-down in a view camera inspired a reassessment of how the world is ordered.”
The Center for the Legacy of Photography, a new initiative of George Eastman House and the Image Permanence Institute at Rochester Institute of Technology, will present a special exhibition, Cause & Effect, which includes vintage photographic prints drawn from George Eastman House’s extensive collection. Work such as an early salt print by Hill & Adamson will be shown side-by-side with later prints in platinum and carbon. Sequences of prints by Alvin Langdon Coburn will reconstruct aesthetic choices made by the artist. Variant prints of Lewis W. Hine’s famous and infamous Powerhouse Mechanic image will be on view. The exhibition will provide insight into historic cause-and-effect relationships of materials and processes. The Center, made possible by a generous grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, focuses on collecting and sharing knowledge about photographic materials of the 19th and 20th centuries.

Elinor Carucci presents some of the recent photographs at Sepia Gallery, New York. They are some very intimate images of her children and the signs of her pregnancy at the exhibition The Intimate Line. Sunil Gupta, Amy Jenkins and Angelika Sher offer insights into the life of children there as well with great snapshots and staged photos and a video installation (Amy Jenkins). Children are easy to handle subjects for an artist because they act so naturally in front of a camera, they quickly forget it. So those pictures seem to be like documents of private moments captured by women.

There is no escaping the ubiquitous draw of celebrity portraiture. From magazine covers to billboards, consumers are besieged with famous faces making kamikaze runs for your hard-earned, increasingly diminishing dollars. So, it comes as no surprise to see more photographers who excel at this form of portraiture that is part conceptual gambit and part advertising tool repackaging their images as coffee-table volumes. The latest wave includes a new book by Rolling Stone magazine's chief photographer from 1992 to 2002, Mark Seliger, “The Music Book” (TeNeues, 160 pages, $75), and another from his predecessor, Annie Leibovitz's aptly titled “Annie Leibovitz at Work” (Random House, 240 pages, $40). There's no question that Seliger's mostly color images are instantly seductive and technically flawless. But context is everything. The Texas-born photographer's portraits, like that of the Red Hot Chili Peppers in the buff or Fleetwood Mac in wedding drag, were conceived to sell magazines with an instant sales pitch aimed at the eyes.
This is precisely the main problem with the pictures and the book: The works are too carefully composed, too wary to let chance enter into the frame or allow happy accidents to intervene in the process. Occasionally, images like Seliger's poignant black-and-white portraits of the late Johnny Cash and Kurt Cobain hint at the guarded vulnerability beneath the public personas of these often-photographed singer-songwriters. Leibovitz is far more versatile when it comes to shaping celebrity portraits and she has a far more inventive spirit. And she shares some of her techniques in “Annie Leibovitz at Work,” which is part autobiography and part journal. The book's text is based on conversations with editor Sharon DeLano. Leibovitz's tone, while casual and often off-the-cuff, is that of a straight-shooter, talking about what it takes to craft savvy images like her iconic 1991 Vanity Fair cover of a pregnant Demi Moore, as well as her legion of portraits for Rolling Stone during the magazine's heyday in the 1970s and early 1980s. Budding photographers can take heart in Leibovitz's chronicle of triumphs and mistakes. The Connecticut-born photographer's story is one of experience forged from a tough-skinned insistence on persevering through decades of assignments that yielded striking images, like her 1978 picture of punk avatar Patti Smith or her moving 1980 portrait of a nude John Lennon embracing his wife Yoko Ono, hours before he was killed outside of New York's Dakota apartment building.
Speaking of Smith, the punk-rock pioneer is an accomplished visual artist in her own right and her ghostly black-and-white photographs get the VIP treatment in “Patti Smith: Land 250” (Thames & Hudson, 300 pages, $75). Juxtaposing short bursts of Smith's prose with haunting photographs, the book offers a curious mixture of hand-scrawled English and French text. But the work's real draw remains the silky, dream-like textures found in select photographs taken during Smith's many travels. Portraits of friends and such ordinary objects as a pair of weather-beaten boots or a snowman are endowed with an almost spectral presence. The eye soaks in these Polaroid images of a life dedicated to the pursuit of art as lovely artifacts of a lyrical vision on the run. Likewise, a true sense of inner visions, manifested as photographic images, radiates from master photographers Mary Ellen Mark, in “Seen Behind the Scene: Forty Years of Photographing on Set” (Phaidon, 264 pages, $59.95), and the late Manuel Alvarez Bravo, with “Photopoetry” (Chronicle Books, 320 pages, $75). These photographers eclipse most, in terms of their shared willingness to be open to spontaneity and receptive to working without a safety net. Both Mark and Alvarez Bravo have created portraits of fellow artists here, but their imagery transcends the genre, making unspoken statements built on extended conversations and on visual riffs that emerge from an intimacy shared between photographers and their subjects. There are Mark's numerous intense portraits of Marlon Brando, on location during Francis Ford Coppola's 1979 epic film “Apocalypse Now.” At other moments, Mark is practically invisible behind her camera's viewfinder, finding just the right angle or shifts of light to reveal the focused intensity and play evoked by such dearly departed giants of the cinema as Federico Fellini, while making 1969's “Satyricon,” or Luis Bunuel, calmly crafting surrealist traps with 1970's “Tristana.”
Alvarez Bravo's kindred spirits, the famous husband-and-wife artists Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, appear as if they are locking gazes with the unseen photographer. But beneath the elegant arrangements of people and objects immortalized in the famed Mexican photographer's images is a droll, surrealist wit reveling in sexually charged tableaux (1938's “Good Reputation Sleeping”) and the everyday sights, suddenly elevated into haunting arias of odd juxtapositions (1928-29's “Wooden Horse”). Like any book of great photography, “Photopoetry” lives up to its playful title, thus inviting repeat viewings from even the most jaded aficionado of the photography book. Graced with a subtle mastery and appetite to see beyond the surface, Alvarez Bravo's photographs do all of the talking, lodging themselves in your memory the way that only masterly photographs can.

Neil Kendricks, a San Diego artist and writer, is the film curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego.

It is rare for a Photographer to have known a model for decades. Jock Sturges has been acquainted with Misty Dawn and her family since the 80's. The volume of photographs “Portrait of a Muse” documents her development from a shy girl to a dignified, self-assured woman. The final picture shows her with her husband Wade. Most of the photographs present images creating a transparency between the world as we experience it awake and dream images. Sturges’ method of photography is influenced by Romanticism and points out psychological and mental conditions detached from the Ego. Bodies meld with nature in the diffuse light of a cloudy day or the harsh contrasts of a sunny one. Sometimes the observer believes he is looking at scenes removed from this world because of their harmony. Still, it is this world, Sturges depicts with his camera. With an incomparable eye.

By Ula Ilnytzky
With stock portfolios plummeting and the economy tanking, owners of expensive art are increasingly using their collections as collateral to obtain a much-needed infusion of cash. Works by Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Willem de Kooning, Andy Warhol are among the pieces collectors have leveraged in recent months. The Metropolitan Opera put up two famed Marc Chagall murals in its lobby as collateral, and renowned photographer Annie Leibovitz recently borrowed $15 million against her entire collection of images. A New York company that issues loans against fine and decorative arts and real estate says it has seen a 40 to 50 percent increase in business over the last six months. Leibovitz obtained her loan from the firm, Art Capital. Other celebrities who reportedly have secured funds with their own works include film director Julian Schnabel. Art Capital co-owner Ian Peck said the firm has "taken in important modern masters, important old masters and very important decorative arts," among other valuable pieces. The firm said it expects to make about $120 million in loans in 2009, up from $80 million last year. Art collections can be lifesavers for people looking for extra cash. The art works are appraised and treated as collateral just like a car or home would be. Art brokers say that people offering up their collections are doing it for a number of reasons, including dealing with financial issues, raising money for businesses or buying more art. Some of the cash-strapped art owners have been burned by Ponzi schemes, Peck said.
Art Capital and Art Finance Partners, another New York lending firm, have also started to hear from small museums and other institutions whose endowments have been deeply cut by a severe drop in private donations. "With the stock market down 40 to 50 percent, people's liquidity is really drying up," said Andrew Rose of Art Finance. "If you're unfortunate to have a lot of stock at Citibank or Lehman Brothers you may have been wiped out substantially."
Art owners are turning to established banks, too. Citigroup and Bank of America, two of a very small number of large banks involved in art lending, have seen a huge growth in the past several months in the number of clients putting art up as collateral. The banking crisis has not had any significant effect on their art lending. Bank of America's U.S. Trust saw a 50 percent increase in clients who leveraged their art between the first quarter of 2008 and the same period this year, said art lending head John Arena. Citigroup's Citi Private Bank employs a group of eight art professionals who advise wealthy collectors on everything from building, appraising and managing their art to securing loans.
"We are working with clients who are using art as collateral with the aim of getting liquidity from the loans to invest in other investments and other assets or to increase their art holdings," said Citi art adviser Suzanne Gyorgy. Both banks look for high-end works of art and try to assemble a diverse portfolio. Arena said they have taken on works from Picasso, Matisse and Monet, among others. "We look for museum quality works, very high-end pieces, and we do the values in house so it's confidential for the client," said Gyorgy. "We look for a diversified group of artists to reduce our risk by not concentrating on any one artist or area." While auction houses also offer loans on art works, those works ultimately wind up at auction. Christie's currently is lending funds to sellers in upcoming sales but not to buyers. New York is not the only place where wealthy individuals are pawning off possession amid the financial meltdown. In the wake of the Bernard Madoff scandal, people who saw their life savings decimated turned to a pawn broker in Palm Beach to raise cash, offering up everything from sports cars to gold jewelry. The banks and the art-lending firms operate in different ways. The banks treat the art works as collateral and only take possession if the owner defaults on the loan, something that rarely happens. Art Capital issues loans at interest rates ranging from 6 to 16 percent and in most cases takes possession of the art, similar to how a pawn broker would claim an item, keeping the pieces in secured storage vaults until the loan is repaid. "We're looking at very large deals now, $40 million to $60 million each," Peck said. "The trend is toward larger deals with more assets in them." (AP)

Galerie Daniel Blau (Munich) presents a collection of rare salt prints from the 19th century by the Fratelli Alinari at the TEFAF in Maastricht. They (Romualdo 1830-1891, Leopoldo 1832- 1865, and Giuseppe 1836- 1890) opened their studios in Florence in 1852. The photographer of the three was Romualdo, who had previously been an engraver with Bardi. By 1855, following their participation in the Paris World Fair, the Alinari Brothers had won acclaim throughout Europe for their fine photographs. The main focus of their work was the photographing of architecture and works of art.

The Museum of Photographic Arts (MoPA) in San Diego presents Ansel Adams: A Life’s Work, an exhibition examining the legacy of a 20th Century photographer. Featuring over 80 photographs, A Life’s Work is a comprehensive and chronological retrospective of the career of Ansel Adams. A Life's Work will be on view May 23, 2009 through October 4, 2009. Adams’ images have entered the collective consciousness and identity of many Americans, and ignited the imaginations of people around the world. Majestic in subject and scope, and painstakingly produced, the photographs of Ansel Adams bring respite and deep appreciation of nature’s beauty and vulnerability. Adams was an unremitting activist for the cause of wilderness and the environment, which makes his photography prescient for today’s concerns. A Life’s Work will allow a younger generation unfamiliar with actual work by the artist, as well as seasoned Adams lovers, to appreciate his achievements.

The exhibition begins with a photographic journey through his early career in the 1920s -1930s, when he first joined, and was exhibited by, the Sierra Club. Adams was the photographer for the month-long High Trip into the Sierra Nevada Mountains the Club took each summer. On one trip, he met a future benefactor, who would underwrite Adams' first portfolio, The Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras (1927). The success of this portfolio was a turning point in his life. He decided after 1927 to devote his life to photography. A rare, vintage copy of these 15 prints will be included in the exhibition. Continuing with a wide range of representative works from the 1930’s and 1940’s, the exhibition showcases Adams’ most productive and experimental decades. A Life’s Work will feature many of his iconic masterworks, alongside several of his lesser known early images.

Ansel Adams, Aspens, Northern New Mexico, 1958, gelatin silver print, courtesy of the Museum of Photographic Arts. Copyright © The Ansel Adams Publishing Rights Trust

Biography
As one of the world’s most prominent technical photographers who set the standard for visualized photography, Ansel Adams started the elite f/64 club and was a member of the Sierra Club. It was during his explorations of the Sierra that Ansel began taking photos of the natural world around him. Wanting to be a concert pianist, Adams gave up that career for photography – which gave him an artistic outlet and allowed him to earn enough money from his commercial works to live. Although he was born into a wealthy family in California, Ansel’s father lost most of his fortune in 1907. His father’s attempts to regain the family’s status and his mother’s constant worry over the matter prompted young Adams to explore his surroundings. He learned at an early age that the physical beauty and wonders of nature could occupy his time and bring a satisfaction that could not be bought. Having trouble in school around the age of 12, Adams quit to be home schooled by his parents and aunts and uncles. Although he had trouble with an institutionalized program of study, Adams began practicing the piano. It was with his piano that he found solace and a way to express himself. After years of study, he became good enough perform, but he knew this would be more of a past time than an actual career.
It was when Ansel Adams visited the Sierra Nevada with his Kodak No. 1 Box Brownie camera that he began taking photos. Even his early pictures of Yosemite and the surrounding mounts inspired him. He became a member of the Sierra Club and each year he would take photos of the group’s month-long hike every summer. He even stayed in the park’s memorial lodge for several months as an overseer. It was his photograph of the Monolith that captured one patron of the art’s attention – Mr. Albert Bender. Mr. Bender would start funding Adam’s trips to take photographs. He also worked with Adams to publish his first book of photographs, entitled Parmelian Prints of the High Sierras. Bender’s encouragement and financial help allowed Ansel to pursue his dreams as a full-time professional photographer. Ansel Adams made several trips to New York during the 1930s and 1940s in order to meet with other famous artists and photographers of the day. Even though he was a Californian, he fit in well, and offered technical advice to some of the top photographers. Adam’s, a self-taught, self-learned photographic genius, inspired these already famous artists. They saw in him a true artist and articulate master of the technical side of photography. He also shared with them his views on visualization, where a photographer can mentally picture how he wants a photo to turn out according to the light available and other variables.
As an environmentalist, he was a major player in the formation of other national parks in the western United States. He fought against the development of national parks for the sake of tourism. He didn’t want national parks to turn into resorts, but wanted them to stay natural. He fought for the redwood trees, for Alaska, and for clean air and water. He fought against overdevelopment, highways, billboards, and worked hard to balance human need with nature. Though he never wrote an autobiography, his work is explored in a biographical discussion of his images in a book entitled Adam’s Classic Images.