HELEN GEE
Helen Gee retouching transparencies, 1955, photograph by Arthur Lavine. Collection Center for Creative Photography, The University of Arizona. All images from Helen Gee: Limelight (Aperture, 2018).
Limelight - a Greenwich Village Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse in the Fifties.
Review by Nina Strand
After reading this book, my first thought was that not much has changed since Helen Gee opened her gallery Limelight in New York in 1954. And at the same time, everything is different. This small gem of a memoir gives a good and interesting backstage view into the photography scene in New York at the time. Through Gee’s memoirs, we follow the career of several household names within the medium, such as Robert Frank and Lisette Model, and we also get a bigger picture of the rise of the photography department at MoMA, which has been vital for the acknowledgment of art for the medium. This might be the reason why Aperture has republished the book that Gee wrote in 1997.
Gee ran the gallery for seven years and made shows with artists such as Ansel Adams, Minor White, Eugéne Atget, Berenice Abbott, Imogen Cunningham and others. She also describes meeting the young and unknown Diane Arbus and James Baldwin. Getting to know how many of those we now call legends or masters of photography struggled to make a living in New York might be comforting for young photographers today. Many of them were oblivious of the impact their work would have later on.
Take Robert Frank for example. At one point, he is denied entry into Limelight. Gee had hired a new bouncer to get control over some troublemakers using the men’s room for drug dealing, and also to exclude the bohos who lingered over a single coffee, filling up the tables. The bouncer is very efficient. Several photographers who frequent Limelight can’t get past him. Frank apparently looked like a boho and had to sneak in via the kitchen entrance. Gee was acquainted with Frank well before he received the Guggenheim Fellowships that took him all over the US photographing a post-war America in a personal and lyrical fashion. For the book The Americans, Frank carefully sequenced the images, linking them together thematically and conceptually to form a visual poem. The images are still fresh and vibrant today, many years after the book was published. Frank’s carefree, exuberant attitude toward the traditional photographic technique changed the face of documentary photography, and yet Gee describes the mixed reception of the book, with some calling it an attack on the country. One accused Frank of having a desire to shock; another said the images were full of hate and hopelessness. Today, this highly influential work is likely to be found on the bookshelves of all the great photographers.
Opening party (Helen Gee and Peggy Tallmer in center), ca. 1954. Photograph by Arthur Lavine, scan courtesy of Gary Schneider.
The first exhibition at Limelight featured the work of Joseph Breitenbart and opened to mixed reviews. Minor White wrote in Aperture that the exhibition ‘was an unfortunate choice because photographs made for publication in magazines rarely look well on walls’.
A show of the work of Eugéne Atget, who had died in 1927, with images chosen and printed by Berenice Abbot, earned glowing reviews. It was praised as the epitome of the pure image, where photography owes nothing to the aesthetics of painting. Gee also approached Abbot about a show of her own work, but Abbot said she thought people saw her as ‘old hat’. Gee eventually persuaded her to show her portraits from the 1920s.
The only delayed show was with Eugene W. Smith. He never could decide on his selection, always rehanging, spending days in the gallery. The moment he left, Gee hung sixty images and was done.
For the show with László Moholy-Nagy, Gee went through his works together with his second wife, who, according to Gee, had thrown his negatives away because they took up too much space. The thought of these valuable negatives in the trash disturbed Gee deeply. When the exhibition opened, several photographers complained about yet another show by an art photographer, urging Gee to exhibit work they considered more relevant. Lisette Model hated the exhibition, claiming about its ‘overemphasis on superficial elements and the lack of meaningful content’. This made me think of the situation today. To make a photographic exhibition in 2021 is challenging in many ways. Even though the medium is still young, it feels as if all images have been seen. Almost every essay on photography over the past years has commented on the image-saturated world in which we live. Even Gee was told by many photographers visiting Limelight that they had seen similar images over and again. She describes how she worried that no-one would come to a show of Minor White, who saw his work as metaphors or visual poems, since the public were more inclined towards photojournalism and less likely to respond to quiet images of rocks and limpid pools.
Gee enjoyed many meetings with Edward Steichen, the renowned curator at MoMA. It began when he invited her to see what would become the famous exhibition The Family of Man on 24 January 1955 at the museum. After the opening, excited photographers ‘piled into Limelight’, celebrating the show. The review from Herald Tribune exclaimed: ‘It can truly be said that with this show, photography has come of age as a medium of expression and as an art form.’ Aline B. Saarinen in the New York Times even went so far as to ask the rhetorical question whether ‘photography has replaced painting as the great visual art of our time’, causing outrage from the city’s painters. In any case, Steichen certainly put photography on the map. Gee got a special viewing of the show, and described it not as an exhibition in the usual sense, but more like a giant, three-dimensional magazine spread.
The first exhibition at Limelight featured the work of Joseph Breitenbach (and was installed by Sid Grossman), May 1954, photograph by Arthur Lavine, scan courtesy of Gary Schneider.
Steichen praised women in the field, telling Gee that he believed they are better suited to be photographers than men, being: ‘more intuitive, open and in touch with their feelings. The future belongs to women.’ At one point Steichen asked Gee to work with him, an offer that she turned down. But their friendship continued and she quotes him throughout the book. She cites his remark in a lecture at the museum, for example, that experimental photography, whether in colour or black and white: ‘need not rely on trick effects. [...] what made a photograph truly experimental was not the content or the approach, but the photographer’s thoughtful, emotional, and artistic responsiveness to the material and the subject.’
One big change from 1954 to today is that now, photography sells. In one passage in Gee’s book, a stunned collector of Old Masters remarks: ‘Why, you can buy a good painting for what some of these things are worth!’ Another found a Paul Strand too expensive. She might well have regretted not buying it later on. The book opens with a letter from Denise Bethel to Gee in 2018, where Bethel addresses this change, wishing that Gee could witness the rise of photography. She comments: ‘It’s ironic that one of your closing shows, the work of Edward Weston, saw some decent sales at seventy-five dollars a print. It’s all very different now. In my life as an auctioneer, I was as ambitious for the medium as you were, and finally, after years in the low-price trenches, I sold not one, but three photographs by Edward Weston for over one million dollars each.’
The final exhibition at Limelight was of Julia Margaret Cameron’s work and Gee felt proud to close with a gifted woman, an exhibition she called ‘special and rare’. Promoting women seems to have been important for her. When the magazine Popular Photography invited her to contribute to an international poll of the ten greatest photographers, writing: ‘The photographers you nominate must be working photographers – men who are currently producing pictures’, Gee took note of the word men and submitted the names of several women: Abbott, Model and Dorothea Lange among others. She was not impressed by the results of the poll, which contained names such as Ansel Adams, Henri Cartier-Bresson and Irving Penn. She could only agree on around four of them, wondering how the list would look in ten or twenty years’ time.
And that’s something that we still ponder: one always needs at least a decade’s distance to understand what has developed and changed. The Steichen-curated exhibition Photographs From the Museum’s Collection, most of them acquired during his eleven years as the chief curator, is used as an example by Gee of how to showcase the important developments in photography from its beginning to the present day.
Gee returned to photography as a curator, lecturer and writer in the late 1970s, and offered her collection of photographs for exhibition and sale in late 2001 and early 2002. These were photographs given to her by photographers who had exhibited at Limelight. She died in 2004. Had she lived on, I would be the first in line to see an exhibition on photography from the last century presented by Helen Gee.
Helen Gee, ca. 1954-1960, photograph by Arthur Lavine, scan courtesy of Gary Schneider.