The son of a famous gallerist reflects on his fathers’ work.
When you are a child you assume your parents are very important professionals without really understanding what they do in their business lives. As a child I did not understand the value of art. I knew gold had a predetermined worth but I did not understand the value of art – not culturally, monetarily, or personally. I knew that it had value because my father’s business was to sell art but I did not know how that came to be.
David Fahey, my father, the son of a road builder, moved to Lynwood, California at the age of twelve with his three siblings. Without a lot of money in the family he found himself working full time at a convenience store at the age of fourteen. He kept that job through high school. If asked about those days he will tell you about attempted robberies at the store and his weekends spent at late night folk and jazz clubs. It was during this time that he started taking photographs. After high school, he enrolled in Compton Jr. College, which was about the same time the Vietnam War was heating up. At the age of twenty he decided to take a semester off from school to make some extra money. He never thought the Draft Board would get him during that one semester – but he was wrong. He spent Woodstock in basic training. When he landed in Vietnam, he was with a couple hundred guys. Some soldiers were told to stay where they landed, but he and some others headed out to the bush. Over the next couple of days they moved into the jungle and ended up on the Cambodian border. He spent the next year in the jungle.
Upon his return from overseas, he went back to college and began studying Fine Art Photography at California State University, Fullerton. He combined two of his passions, photography and music, and started photographing the musical acts at the Troubadour, bartering his prints for entry to the shows. By the time he finished his MA in Creative Photography, he had become the Director of Contemporary Photography at the G. Ray Hawkins Gallery in West Hollywood. For the next eleven years, he organized exhibitions, made artists’ portraits, and for a brief time contributed to Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine. He also conducted lengthy interviews with photographers for the gallery’s publication, the Photo Bulletin.
In 1986, as fate would have it, my father was approached by his friend and former employer, Randee Klein about starting a business venture together. Both being avid art enthusiasts and collectors, the discussion led to the formation of the Fahey/Klein Gallery.
As a child it was much easier to understand what an artist does than what my father did for a living. It was always hard trying to explain my father’s occupation to people. “No, he is not an artist” I would say, or, “No, he sells other people’s pictures, not his own.” I found myself stuck trying to explain the value of other people’s artwork. Growing up in an art environment and later receiving an art education allowed me to better understand artists and the art world. This knowledge helped me to better explain what my father did for a living.
In the early years, much of the photography my father exhibited, collected and sold was new to the general public. The photographs had a value that could not easily be explained to a child. I knew my father was important in the world of photography, I could see it in the way people talked to him. It was only later that I realized that he was helping to create a market in Fine Art Photography.
After I left home and went to college, I realized how much he was doing to raise the status of photography in the art world. I was proud to read everything in the photography section of my art history books and already know so much from my father’s lessons. When I started studying and practicing art I began to realize he was an artist himself.
For as long as I can remember, he worked as much at home as he did at the gallery, but whenever pressed or asked about what he was doing he would always say, “just working on my stuff.” I realize my father had been continuously working on his photography during much of my life, he just did not call it art. I was used to artists showing their work; but he had years of work he had never shown anyone.
Before I was born, he began his Polaroid portrait series of all the artists that he exhibited at the gallery. Throughout my childhood, he made artist portraits in their environment and later compiled intense diaries that documented his life in the art world. To most people he was a champion for several of the great Fine Art photographers of the past thirty years – people like Peter Beard, Garry Winogrand, Herb Ritts, and many others. While the art world saw him mounting exhibitions, I saw his days off, Sunday and Monday, working on his journals and photographs, and also proofing and editing the many photography books to which he contributed.
Over the years, photography has gained the notoriety of the Fine Art world and allowed these artists’ work to live on in private collections and museums. When he first began making his portraits, only a small group of people knew of the work of Andre Kertesz, Manuel Alvarez Bravo, or Joel-Peter Witkin. While he was exhibiting and selling their work, elevating them as serious artists, he was also looking at them as subjects. He was one of the lucky few to put them in front of the camera and let these artists experience themselves being the subject.
All too often the identity of an image-maker goes unknown. His large archive of personal photography not only shows his participation in the art world it also shows his fascination with the artist as a personality. His relationship to these people gave him a different type of access. These are all intimate images of photographers he respects, admires and with whom he has a professional relationship. Because of the relationships he has with the photographers, it is more difficult for them to hide behind their camera when asked for a portrait. By exposing their work to the larger audience, their photographs have become prominent in the culture thus making the photographers well known. Now my father’s portraits, in turn, will make some of these photographers recognizable.
My father is now reflecting back on his early portraits and starting to show friends and colleagues his portraits of many of the photographers that are important to us, the viewer.
Nicholas Fahey
