Despite his deep immersion in the legal world of trusts and estates, Michael Whalen has consistently shunned the conventional. One would expect his A List clients, but he has also represented Ansel Adams and Bettie Page. He serves on the Herb Ritts Foundation Board and is a fixture at Hugh Hefner’s notorious Midsummer Night’s Dream Party.
So, it is no surprise that this dashing iconoclast would shun a greatest-hits, signature collection and would approach the field in a way that is entirely new. Whalen intuitively understood that any important picture was almost always part of a complex intellectual process and that the entire sequence leading up to a key image could be as important as the image itself.
Whalen took one look at a unique, matched set of Josef Breitenbach’s nine portraits of James Joyce in Paris on July 5, 1937, spotted the most famous image, and to the dealer’s delight, immediately bought the complete sequence.
The A List of photographers Whalen has collected in sequence is impressive: Richard Avedon, Edouard Baldus, Harry Callahan, Ralston Crawford, Baron DeMeyer, Elliott Erwitt, Frederick Evans, Leonard Freed, Andre Kertesz, Gustave LeGray, Helen Levitt, Duane Michals, Tina Modotti, Lisette Model, Eadweard Muybridge, Irving Penn, Aleksandr Rodchenko, Milton Rogovin, Eric Salomon, Paul Strand, Weegee, Edward Weston and sixty-eight more.
Curator Dennis Reed wrote about Michael Whalen’s compulsion to collect:
“Imagine adding an extra requirement in your quest to collect, such as, you must find not a single work by a photographer, but each and every variation of a particular photographic session. This might be relatively easy if the artist produced the work as a series and issued them as a complete group. But what if the artist produced several versions of a work and sold them separately over the years?
“How do you find them? How do you know when you have found them all? How long might it take to reassemble them? It could be a daunting task. Collecting all of the images from single photography sessions is exactly the challenge that Michael R. Whalen has set for himself.”
So what do we find out when a photographer’s complex intellectual process is revealed? We learn that photographers are much smarter than we ever imagined and that the great photographs we all admire are no accident. And it took Michael Whalen to prove it to us.
Peter C. Jones
