“The Image Gallery: Redux 1959-1962” Exhibition

Howard Greenberg Gallery

poster for “The Image Gallery: Redux 1959-1962” Exhibition

This event has ended.

In 1959, a photographer named Larry Siegel opened a gallery dedicated exclusively to photography in a small storefront on East 10th Street in New York City. The Image Gallery, which remained open until 1962, showed the work of leading photographers including Rudy Burckhardt, Sid Grossman, Saul Leiter, Duane Michals, Charles Pratt, and Garry Winogrand, becoming one of the earliest models for exhibiting photography as an art form. Howard Greenberg Gallery will present The Image Gallery: Redux 1959-1962 from January 9 – February 15, 2014. The exhibition will feature the work of 22 photographers whose work was shown at that legendary gallery.

“In those days, photographic prints were not well known,” Larry Siegel notes. “People would walk in, point to the wall, and ask, ‘What’s that?’ They thought I had cut the images out of a magazine!”

The early history of photography galleries in New York City is quite brief. Few had attempted to exhibit photographs commercially prior to the birth of the photography market in the 1970s. Helen Gee’s Limelight Gallery, with its adjoining coffeehouse, exhibited photographs from 1954 to 1961 in Greenwich Village. Roy DeCarava founded A Photographer’s Gallery on the Upper West Side, which was open from 1954 to 1957. Before then, Alfred Stieglitz’s Little Galleries of the Photo-Succession (1905-1908) and 291 Gallery (1908-1917), along with the Julien Levy Gallery (1931-1949) showed photographs alongside paintings, drawings, and sculptures, striving to elevate the medium of photography.

A meeting place for photographers, The Image Gallery attracted a wide range of important artists. Eugene Smith stopped by early to visit the first exhibition and ended up helping to hang the show when Larry Siegel realized that he had never done so himself. Two photographers who showed their work at the gallery were neighborhood residents; Saul Leiter lived across the street, and Robert Frank lived around the corner and would stop by regularly. Other visitors included the photographers Ansel Adams, Roman Vishniac, Aaron Siskind, and Minor White, as well as writers from The New York Times and The Village Voice, who reviewed exhibitions regularly. The Image Gallery gave Duane Michals his first gallery show, and Garry Winogrand his first solo show in New York City. The gallery also presented a Eugène Atget exhibition before his show at The Museum of Modern Art. Works by Walker Evans, Robert Frank, and Helen Levitt were donated to the gallery for a holiday exhibition.

[Image: Kenneth Van Sickle “Toile” (1962) gelatin silver print 12 x 18 in. courtesy the artist/Howard Greenberg Gallery, New York]

Media

  • Facebook

    Reviews

    All content on this site is © their respective owner(s).
    New York Art Beat (2008) - About - Contact - Privacy - Terms of Use