W.M. HUNT: "Foule - American Groups before 1950" in Arles from the WM Hunt Collection + NYC 2015

from the W.M. Hunt Collection

“Foule - American Groups before 1950" 

7 July – 21 September, 2014 

Palais de l'Archevêché

35 Place de la République, 13200 Arles France

“Ramona Lodge”, Women in costume, early 20th Century 

Unknown Photographer or Studio

Men with bow ties, 1890's. Horner Studio

“The Human U.S. Shield, 30,000 Officers & Men, at Camp Custer, Battle Creek Michigan, Brigadier General Howard L. Laubauch, Commanding”, 1918.  Mole & Thomas (Arthur Mole b. England 1889 – died US 1983 & John D. Thomas, American, dates unknown) 

Click on images to enlarge!

 “Hunt’s Three Ring, Circus”, Northport, LI, NY

June 26th, 1921, E.J. (Edward J.) Kelty

2015 UPDATE:

NYC, 2015: "Hunt's Three Ring Circus: American Groups Before 1950" opens Monday, September 28th, 2015, 6-8 PM, 1285 Avenue of the Americas Gallery, New York, New York. 

2014 ORIGINAL
The W.M. Hunt Collection

“Foule - American Groups before 1950" 

7 July – 21 September, 2014 

Palais de l'Archevêché

35 Place de la République, 13200 Arles France

 VIMEO

Play this short VIMEO with Collector W.M. Hunt

VIVIAN MAIER | SELF PORTRAITS: Exhibition and Book Signing at Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier: Self-Portrait, September 10, 1955–Anaheim, California

Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier: Self-Portrait Exhibition
 

"An exhibition of self-portraits by recently discovered street photographer Vivian Maier made from 1950 – 1976 will be on view at Howard Greenberg Gallery from November 8 – January 4, 2014. The exhibition coincides with the publication of the book Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits (powerHouse Books, Nov. 2013) that surveys Maier’s self-portraits, many of which are being shown and published for the first time. Opening reception will be Thursday, November 7, from 6-8 p.m"

"The story of Vivian Maier has practically become a photography legend:  Born in New York City in 1926, she spent much of her youth in France. Returning to the U.S. in 1951, she worked as a nanny in Chicago and New York for 40 years. Reclusive and eccentric, she took pictures all the time, yet never showed them to anyone. From the 1950s to the 1990s, with a Rolleiflex dangling from her neck, she made over 100,000 images, primarily of people and cityscapes."

"Maier’s massive body of work, which could have been destined for obscurity, was housed in a storage locker in Chicago for many years. Unbeknownst to her caretakers (three of the grown children she had looked after), the contents of her storage locker had been dispersed due to non-payment. Her negatives were discovered by Chicago-based realtor and historian John Maloof at an auction house in Chicago in 2007. Maloof pieced together the identity of the mysterious photographer, but Vivian Maier died in 2009, before Maloof was able to speak with her. In the years that followed, Maloof has brought her work to the attention of the art world and the general public; and since 2010, nearly 20 exhibitions of photographs by Vivian Maier have been mounted in the U.S. and Europe. Numerous critics have written that her work will be remembered as some of the best 20^th-century street photography." – Text courtesy of the Howard Greenberg Gallery

Vivian Maier: Self-Portrait at Howard Greenberg Gallery is the first exhibition to explore the photographer’s numerous self-portraits and the first U.S. gallery exhibition of her color work.

Vivian Maier: Self-Portrait 

Exhibition: Nov 7 – January 4, 2014

Howard Greenberg Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY

 powerHouse Books, November 2013

Photographs by Vivian Maier

Edited by John Maloof, Essay by Elizabeth Avedon

Vivian Maier: Self-Portraits
Howard Greenberg Gallery
41 East 57th Street
New York, NY

HOWARD GREENBERG: The Interview

  Dorothea Lange, Migratory Cotton Picker, Eloy, Arizona, 1940 

© Library of Congress, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

                           

 Dorothea Lange, Plantation Overseer And His Field Hands, Mississippi Delta near Clarksdale, Mississippi, 1936 © Library of Congress, Courtesy Howard Greenberg Gallery

"I really enjoyed getting “Plantation Overseer And His Field Hands” by Dorothea Lange. It’s not the most valuable FSA print, but it’s such an interesting picture. Read pages 48-49 in my book [An American Gallery, Twenty-Five Years of Photography]; you’ll see why I have it. You can read so much into this photograph. The white farm owner, the ex-slave workers, their relationship to each other; it has a kind of universal symbolism. That’s the way I knew it. But then I came across this FSA print one day. On the left, almost out of the frame, is her husband Paul Taylor. It speaks to the issue of what is truth in a photograph, what’s real in a real photograph. [View the traditional cropping here.  Her husband is cropped out in the well known image] I found this to be such a fascinating example because this photograph is one that always stuck in my head as just a great amazing photograph." 

"Do you know the picture “White Angel Breadline”? I have a variant of that. It’s the picture immediately before or after. It’s all the same people in the picture, the same spot she photographed in; but the way the people move and the way it’s structured; it becomes a very different picture. It’s really amazing. I think it’s in the show, so you’ll see it. That is another one; I sold it and then bought it back and I kept it the second time. That kind of thing has happened a lot more than once because I do fall in love with these things and a lot of times I sell them and miss them." – Howard Greenberg from my original Le Journal de la Photographie Interview

Howard Greenberg, Collection opened at the Musée de l’Elysée September 2012. Exhibited for the first time were a selection of 120 photographs from Howard Greenberg’s private collection.

2014-15  UPDATE

September 10, 2014 – January 11, 2015

 "Masterpieces from the Howard Greenberg Collection" 

Joods Historisch Museum / Jewish Historical Museum

Nieuwe Amstelstraat 1, 1011 PL Amsterdam

Howard Greenberg Photo © Elizabeth Paul Avedon

"Howard Greenberg Talks To Elizabeth Avedon" 

 The Interview: Le Journal de la Photographie

It’s not an encyclopedic history of photography...it’s the magic of photography when the right picture printed the right way just grabs you. – Howard Greenberg

Howard Greenberg’s name has been synonymous with great photography for over thirty years. A leader in the modern photography market, Greenberg early on established himself as one of the pillars of the New York photography scene. Now a selection of photographs from Greenberg’s personal photography collection will be exhibited for the first time at the Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne in September and the Henri Cartier-Bresson Foundation, Paris in January.

I sat down with Howard Greenberg last week and came away bedazzled by his contagious enthusiasm and love for photography and descriptions of some of my favorite photographers work.

Elizabeth Avedon: I’m curious why it took so long to show your Collection?

Howard Greenberg: First of all, I have to say my collection is really, truly personal. There are many known photographs, classic photographs, in the collection to be sure. But there are more than that many photographs which are unknown or hardly known or certainly not what you would consider important - but they are important to me for my own personal reasons. It’s my life and just like in your life you’ll see certain pictures you can relate to, you want it because of your experience. So it’s that way with my collection.

And also, I started as a photographer and I was like most photographers earlier on, a darkroom junkie, I loved to print and I was completely enamored of printing. When I started to learn about the history of photography and saw older prints that were beautiful prints - that was something yet again. A lot of the photographs in my collection got there because the print of the image was truly special to me. It’s really about the magic of photography. That’s how I see it. In so many pictures that I fall in love with, that I bought for myself, display that magic....

"Howard Greenberg Talks To Elizabeth Avedon" 

 The Interview: *Le Journal de la Photographie

The Howard Greenberg Gallery

 Unfortunately *Le Journal de la Photographie has since closed
The complete Interview is not posted online

GEORGE PLATT LYNES | The Jack B. Woody Collection: Steven Kasher Gallery to April 7

James Leslie Daniels, ca. 1937
(Jimmie Daniels, Singer at Le Ruban Bleu...read more)
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Self-Portrait, ca. 1945
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Robert McVoy, ca. 1941
(Robert McVoy was a dancer in Lincoln Kirstein’s company,
Kirstein co-founded the New York City Ballet...read more)
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

George Tichenor, 1939
(Lynes fell in love with his studio assistant George Tichenor,
who was killed during the War...read more)
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Gloria Swanson, ca. 1939
(One of the most prominent stars of silent films)
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Marsden Hartley, 1943
(American Modernist painter, poet, and essayist)
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Bill Miller, 1944
Photograph by George Platt Lynes
Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

Jack B. Woody | George Platt Lynes Collection at Steven Kasher Gallery

Courtesy of Steven Kasher Gallery, New York

JACK B. WOODY, editor and publisher of Twelvetrees Press and Twin Palms Publishers, has produced some of the finest photography and art books for over thirty years. Woody’s first published photography book, George Platt Lynes: Photographs 1931-1955 (Twelvetrees Press, 1981), was immediately recognized as a classic monograph. Platt Lynes had been a highly successful fashion and portrait photographer in the 1930s and 1940s, rediscovered by Woody in the late 1970's. His George Platt Lynes Collection can now be viewed at the Steven Kasher Gallery through April 7.

From An Interview with Jack Woody: "While working as Director of Photography for the Nicholas Wilder Gallery in L.A. in the late '70's, Duane Michals told me, “There’s someone really out of fashion, a photographer named George Platt Lynes, you might be interested in.” About six months later someone called the gallery and said, “There’s a man in Berkley that wants to sell an album of approximately fifty photographs. Most of them are male nudes.” I went to San Francisco to meet Samuel Steward. George Platt Lyons’s had given him all of these photographs in the ‘50’s. There were fifty photographs. I had gone with a dealer from San Francisco, so I put up half the money and he put up the other half and we bought the album. That became the basis for my first photography book."

"I decided I wanted to do the George Platt Lynes book. I had the collection of fifty images, but I wanted about a hundred for the book. I spent two years tracking down all the living models and accumulating their photographs for this book – I borrowed some and some I bought.. Back then they weren’t worth anything. No one even knew who this George Platt Lynes was. I applied to the National Endowment for the Arts for a grant for the book and I got $12,500. from one of the non-profit arts organizations in LA."

"I sold the books by hand to the Strand and took them to Rizzoli on 57th Street in New York; they bought like fifty of them and put them in the window on Fifth Avenue. I went home and got a call from Andy Grundberg of the New York Times. He said, “I saw your George Platt Lynes book at Rizzoli. Could you send me a review copy?” I had no idea what a review copy was, all I knew is it was free. I said, “What is it for?” He said, “I’d like to write a review”. He gave me The New York Times Fed Ex number, so I sent it to him. He wrote this amazing review, and it just exploded from there."–Jack B. Woody (read more here)

George Platt Lynes
March 1st to April 7th
Steven Kasher Gallery

521 west 23 street new york

An Interview with Jack Woody
La Lettre de la Photographie

W.M.HUNT: George Eastman House Exhibition

W.M. Hunt at Home, Oct 2011
Photograph © Elizabeth Paul Avedon

The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious
(Aperture, 2011) by W.M. Hunt

The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the Unconscious
(Thames and Hudson, 2011) by W.M. Hunt

"W.M. Hunt Talks To Elizabeth Avedon"
La Lettre de la Photographie

When I turned 50, I decided my life’s mission would be to promote the pleasure of photography. – William Hunt

The first U.S. exhibition of 550 photographs from W.M. Hunt’s extraordinary collection opened at the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film. Selected works include photographs by Man Ray, Irving Penn, Robert Frank, Diane Arbus, Richard Avedon, Edward Steichen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Berenice Abbott, and Nadar in a range of formats from daguerreotype to digital. Highlights from the collection have previously been shown at the Rencontres de la Photographie in Arles, France; the Musée de l’Elysée in Lausanne, Switzerland; and Foam-Fotografiemuseum in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Thames & Hudson in the UK, Actes Sud in France and Aperture in the U.S. are simultaneously publishing his book, The Unseen Eye: Photographs From the W.M. Hunt Collection, to accompany the show.

Hunt’s collection follows an unprecedented theme in which the subject’s eyes are averted, hidden, concealed, pierced, or missing in every photograph. He began collecting over forty years ago with his first acquisition, Veiled Woman, by Imogen Cunningham...read the full Interview here

+ + +

Photographer Paolo Ventura exploring Hunt's Collection

[Paolo Ventura comes into the apartment during our talk. His exhibition The Automaton of Venice is at the Hasted Kraeutler Gallery through October 15 and he’s visiting for the day before returning to Italy. Ventura and Hunt discuss some 19th century photographs of nude women, prostitutes, Paolo saw in a flea market. Somebody had drawn beautiful masks to cover the eyes on the negatives.]

WM Hunt: The mask thing is a strange thing in the collection, because masks let the eyes in and this is very much about not letting the eyes in. For the show at the Eastman House I took out all the masks, so there are pictures in the book that aren’t going to be in the show.

My sister is the only one who’s seen all the different incarnations of this collection, so I’m curious to see what she thinks. This one will be really dense...read the full Interview here

+ + +

W.M. Hunt, with Gary Schneider diptych, Retinas, 1998.
Photograph © Elizabeth Paul Avedon

WM Hunt: Gary Schneider was doing a talk at ICP one night, just beginning work on the Genetic Self-Portrait series, and he showed a slide of this diptych. (Retinas, from ‘Genetic Self-Portrait’, 1998) When the lecture was over, I made a beeline for him. I wanted it. It looks like this moonlit night in the haunted forest; it looks like a lot of things. I think it’s very exciting.

[In “The Unseen Eye,” W.M. Hunt writes: “This is part of Gary Schneider’s ambitious self-portrait series, based on the extraordinary conceit of appropriating X-rays of the interiors of his own eyes – this really is the ‘unseen eye’ – and then printing these in his exquisite and exacting fashion. This image is a haunted landscape of the soul under a full moon, eerie and rapturous.”]

I’ve known Gary a long time and think he’s a real talent. His skill as a printer always preceded him. He had a photograph of a friend of ours daughter, Fotofolio’s Julie Galant and Martin Bondells’ daughter, Anya, when she was about 8 or 10. I bought it. It’s a great, great picture now in the book. (Gary Schneider, Anya, 1994)...read the full Interview here

The Unseen Eye: Photographs from the W.M. Hunt Collection
George Eastman House, Rochester, New York
Oct. 2011 - Feb. 19, 2012

+ + +

W.M. Hunt Talks To Elizabeth Avedon
La Lettre de la Photographie