Day 1
I leave home this morning as if I’m leaving for a long journey. One to a faraway land.
My nose pressed against the taxi window, I watch New York fly by.
The adventure starts now.
Camera, lenses, memory card. Check.
Flash, batteries, accessories. Check.
Tripod. Check.
Voice recorder and iPhone. Check.
Chris Levine, Patrick Smith, Abelardo Morell, Andy Warhol, Fabian Miller, the Sartorialist, of course James’ blog The Year In Pictures – that’s pretty much all I know about the Danziger Gallery.
I get out of the taxi (as elegantly as I can under 25 pounds of photo equipment) and James Danziger is there on the sidewalk, deep in conversation with a security guard.
He motions for me to wait inside.
It’s 9 in the morning on Thursday, February 2, and the gallery is still asleep.
I step quietly into a space I have only ever seen in party mode.
Nothing moves. All is silent. In the half-light I can make out a few large prints slowly waking up.
I like this in-between time, exciting and frightening at once.
I tiptoe among Patrick Smith’s skiers and several of Chris Levine’s portraits of the Queen – what a nerve, but what a series! I love it. James would tell me later that the Queen liked the portraits, but that since the shoot her advisers have insisted on approving any portrait of her before publication. He also told me that Levine took on the role of stylist for the shoot, who would have thought that the Queen of England didn’t have a dozen stylists when she is being photographed?
Suddenly the lights come on, interrupting my thoughts and the murmurs of darkness. James enters and takes me to his office. He clears a little space for us to sit among the dozens of frames.
He smiles and starts to speak…
I will remember the moment when James shows me his choice of photo: a work by Mario Giacomelli, one from his series of priests.
I love the humor of this photograph, the incredible moment he captures and the striking impression that the whole lighthearted scene could suddenly turn into a catastrophe. Such a hallucinatory moment. He laughs.
Ten minutes later I’m back on the sidewalk, my head spinning with this first art dealer’s story and already eager for the next.
Thank you, James.
Cigarette. Check.
From his first encounter with photography to the opening of his own gallery…
JD has been interested in photography since childhood. He took classes in middle school before concentrating on writing and the art of the interview in high school.
In 1975 he and a friend undertook a series of interviews with the great photographers of the era: Elliott Erwitt, Yousuf Karsh, Minor White, Imogen Cunningham, Cornell Capa, Arnold Newman, Lord Snowdon and Brett Weston.
They turned their project into a book: Interviews with Master Photographers.
James says that good interviewers have to know either nothing or everything about their subject. I laugh.
He then began working for the Photographer’s Gallery in London, followed by seven years at London’s Sunday Times and its magazine, where he replaced Bruce Bernard. Soon after Tina Brown invited him to New York to work for Vanity Fair.
In 1990, he founded his own gallery after taking over three spaces that previously belonged to Perry Rubenstein.
His best memory as a gallerist…
His meeting with Robert Rigger.
At the time, Rigger was an illustrator at Sports Illustrated, and his photographs served as the basis for his illustrations.
When Pierre Galaci introduced James to the illustrator’s work, Rigger was living in near poverty in a California surfing town, dreaming that a gallery owner would come calling.
Together they organized an exhibition in New York. Rigger was already ill, and the show took on a special importance for him.
On opening day, the head of the San Diego baseball team purchased all 80 photographs.
Rigger passed away the day the exhibition closed.
His worst memory as a gallerist…
That happens once a week, when you’re scrambling to find a print or a document.
The first photograph he bought for himself? Or one that has a special importance in his life…
One of the photographs from Mario Giacomelli’s series Priests.
On his bedroom wall…
Georgia O’Keeffe’s hand by Alfred Stieglitz
A woman’s back by Irving Penn
Pyramids by Sheila Metzner
And, on the other side of the wall, two Edward Westons from the series Nude on the Dunes.
