“…in a sense it’s really an Index of Index’s”
A new image database, Art Photo Index, was launched earlier this year created by Rixon Reed, Founder and Director of photo-eye Galleries and Bookstore. Art Photo Index (API) promises to make it easier to search and browse work by fine art and documentary photographers from around the world. Based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, photo-eye’s Gallery and Bookstore are filled with exquisite limited edition books, portfolios and exhibitions of contemporary photography. I stopped by to talk with Reed about API during one of Santa Fe’s heavy snowstorms.
Elizabeth Avedon: How did you conceive of Art Photo Index, what was the idea behind it?
Rixon Reed: I started developing Art Photo Index four years ago after finding it time-consuming to search for new artists to show on Photographer’s Showcase, our online gallery of emerging artists at photoeye.com. I spent way too much time visiting different websites hoping to find new work that was of interest. Searching Google Images was just inefficient, either it was too general in its findings, with irrelevant matches, or it retrieved popular, well-known images instead of work by emerging artists. It was not the discovery tool I was after.
I thought there’s got to be a better way; perhaps there should be a website that is pre-vetted, but on a grand scale, so that anybody who had a serious interest in art photography could go there, search and discover interesting contemporary work. I had the idea to create a website of artists already recognized by important organizations from through out the world.
That started us down the road of compiling a list of artists to invite to become part of Art Photo Index. We let other organizations and publications do the vetting of the artists we include and invited winners of various competitions from Center’s Review Santa Fe, to Critical Mass 50, along with photographers published in Foam Magazine, Aperture, Camera Austria to name just a few. This allows us to maintain an extremely high level of quality throughout the site. We are constantly expanding the number of organizations and well-known galleries’ rosters of artists and there’s a section for each of the included organizations along with cross-referenced links to their artists’ pages.
So in a sense it’s really an index of indexes. The net effect is that we’ve created an ever-growing resource to help people discover exciting contemporary photography.
When you first visit API it shows you what’s new since you were there last. It keeps track of you. For example it may show you “What’s new on API since you were last here 8 days ago: 144 new images by 17 photographers from 10 different countries.”
From there you can explore the Index in detail. Currently API includes over 16,000 images by 3000+ photographers from 88 countries. It includes a powerful search engine that uses over 21,000 keywords to help viewers discover work of interest. We feature a different artist each week and include artist profiles, projects and portfolios, bibliographies, contact information, website screenshots and a fantastic world map showing the city where each of the artists lives.
Art Photo Index enables viewers to easily create collections of images and be notified when artists they follow upload new work. You may drag-and-drop work into your own private collections, sequence it, and create multiple collections of images to suit your purposes. We think curators, picture editors and educators are going to love this because they are able to digitally project these images and create classroom discussions around contemporary work they’ve discovered on API.
And coming up this summer, our curated series of exhibitions opens with “Fear and Loathing,” an online exhibition created by Katherine Ware, Curator of Photography, New Mexico Museum of Art. Our second show “Those are not MY family values” curated by Rebecca Senf, Norton Family Curator of Photography, Center for Creative Photography and the Phoenix Art Museum will open early this fall. We have a number of renowned curators lined up after that. It’s going to be an exciting program of museum quality shows from work by artists included in the index.
EA: How did you get started in photography?
RR: I moved to New York in 1973 to attend NYU film school after graduating from the University of Arkansas. New York was so energized, so astounding that it was hard for me to focus on becoming a filmmaker. I was soaking in so much from just being in the city and taking advantage of what it had to offer. I loved still photography and I¹d gone to various galleries that were just beginning to popup, including Lee Witkin’s groundbreaking gallery. I really fell in love with art photography at that point in time and eagerly applied for a job at Witkin Gallery. I bided my time until Lee hired me to run the gallery’s book department. I worked there from 1975 to 1979, managing the in-print books — at the time, the largest selection of photo books in the world. My colleague there, Carol Fruchter, was in charge of the out-of-print books. That’s how I learned about the collectability of the photo book. It was an amazing education. So when I left New York in 1979 to move to Austin, I decided to start photo-eye as a mail-order photo business. Austin is also where I met my life-partner, Vicki Bohannon.
EA: Wasn’t a mail-order photo book business an unusual venture in 1979?
RR: Yes. Light Impressions and A Photographer’s Place were about the only other mail-order photo book sources. I would send out our listings on a monthly basis, typed on an IBM electronic typewriter, changing out the little Selectric type ball to produce different font faces. Later these little newsletters grew into our quarterly illustrated booklists known throughout the world. I curated each month’s selections starting with “Georgia O’Keeffe, A Portrait by Alfred Stieglitz,” as our highlighted book. photo-eye started small, but over time we grew to become one of the largest, best-known photo book sources in the world.
Vicki and I moved photo-eye to Santa Fe in 1991 and opened up a combined gallery and bookstore right in the complex where we are now. In 1996, we added a second space in a house adjacent to our original building and eventually moved the bookstore into it, enlarging the gallery as a bigger, more contemporary space. The house does make a great bookstore and it includes our offices along with shipping/receiving for our Internet business.
We started our website for photo-eye shortly after Amazon began making its presence known around 1996. I¹ve always loved computers and became a programmer by necessity early on, so I took this as an opportunity to create one of the first e-commerce book sites, apart from Amazon. I understood early on that the Internet was the future of bookselling. The Internet provided a great worldwide audience for us, but it’s a doubled-edged sword because viewers can just click from one site to another, order books from Amazon or somewhere else. To survive, we figured out what we could offer apart from what Amazon could. Thus we started focusing on signed books, esoteric, limited and foreign titles.
Our online magazine and blog feature new books as they arrive, spreading the word with interviews, book reviews and our annual best books feature where we poll 25 luminaries from the photo book world to give us their view of the best books of the year.
We also started our publishing program. David Trautrimas’s “Habitat Machines” was our first handmade pigment ink book. Each book or portfolio in the series is contained in an engraved, aluminum box. Subsequent to David’s monumental book, we started our loose plate portfolio series, with each including 12 to 15 pigment ink prints. We still carry over the book theme in that they are sequenced and you can hold them in your hand and go through them even though they are separate 11×14 inch plates. So far we¹ve published four including Hiroshi Watanabe’s “Suo Sarumawashi” monkey portraits, Dutch photographer Carla Van Puttelaar’s nudes, and Tom Chambers “Sonando Hacia Atras” Mexican work. We’ll be continuing the series later this year.
We also wanted to expand our gallery online at photoeye.com and created Photographers Showcase to focus on emerging artists. We think of Showcase as an extension of our formal gallery.
EA: How are artists admitted into the Photographers Showcase?
RR: Artists submit work via an online administration. The gallery and Showcase staff looks at the work and decides, “If we had unlimited walls, would we show this work?” Our submissions guideline can be found on our website. The work is for sale online and our gallery acts as the go-between the collector and the artist. Showcase has helped launch the careers of a number of talented artists.
As part of developing the Showcase, we built tools for artists to administer their own work at photo-eye. Evolving out of this came a website hosting business called VisualServer, which hosts the websites of many great photographers such as Nick Brandt and Julie Blackmon, along with painters, sculptors, and other visual artists. We built great tools to help non-computer savvy artists to easily manage their work and their website online.
In order to sell more out-of-print books, I developed an online auction division. We have a photography book expert, Eric Miles in charge of the auctions. Eric coordinates the consignments from all over the world, writes the descriptions and researches prices. It’s been a great way for collectors to purchase amazing material published throughout the world. It’s also a great education for many in the value and the history of the photography book.
EA: A lot of careers began at photo-eye.
RR: We’ve had a lot of great people start their photo careers at photo-eye. I feel fortunate and grateful to the many energetic, smart and talented people who have worked here. Many have gone on to become involved in other aspects of art photography, including publishing, editing and curating. We have also discovered a number of great artists through our online venues. For example we were Julie Blackmon¹s first commercial gallery, moving her into the formal gallery after a successful stint on our Photographer’s Showcase. We gave Hiroshi Watanabe some of his first gallery visibility, along with Tom Chambers.
EA: I was first introduced to the great Finnish photographer Pentti Sammallahti’s work from Vicki and you introduced me to the unique photography of Don Hong-Oai.
RR: We discovered Pentti at Houston’s FotoFest in the early 1990s and Don Hong-Oai from Ruth Silverman¹s San Francisco gallery. Later, Ruth would become executor of Don Hong-Oai’s estate. She discovered him selling his photographs during San Francisco street art bazaars. She fell in love with the work and started collecting it and then later selling it. She opened up her gallery in San Francisco and I saw his work there and fell in love with it and began selling it. He passed away a number of years ago and there aren¹t that many vintage prints left. We have a nice inventory of them that are still available for sale.
[Vicki Bohannon enters stamping snow from her boots. Loud greetings on both our parts.]
EA: I was just talking about you introducing me to the incredible photographs of Pentti Sammallahti and we were just discussing photo-eye’s beginnings in Austin.
RR: I don¹t know what I would have done in terms of starting photo-eye without Vicki. She built the physical infrastructure for the business including (literally) the house we started photo-eye in. She is also the Gallery’s Preparator, hanging each of the shows we do. Vicki is the hands-on person at photo-eye and is the love of my life.
EA: Vicki, your book teases for Photo-eye are the best online. I know a lot of work goes into creating them.
VB: I made this special setup for doing our book teases. It’s not a simple matter to do these without reflections, etc. I built this big copy stand to use for photographing the books. The camera is connected to a computer that includes special software that we use for image captures. I have a cover glass connected with chains allowing me to lower the glass down so that it lays on top of the book page spreads to keep them flat. And I take the time to select the spreads that give a good sense of the books and then light them properly with polarized light. It¹s an elaborate system I designed because it’s not easy to photograph a book well.
EA: I tell my students to follow your site because you carry emerging photographers self-published books.
RR: The explosion of books on demand and self-published books pose a special challenge, thus we developed a new program called Publisher Direct. It¹s a way for photographers to catalogue and sell directly through our system the books they’ve published. The Publisher Direct program gets these books into our database and search engine, but when a viewer clicks the purchase button, it goes directly to the publisher or photographer’s site for purchasing. We offer our book tease as an option too. It’s a great way to get self-published books and books on demand — those that have no wholesale margin — into the photo-eye database. We started this program about a year and half ago and it’s yet another example of adapting to the fast moving times we live in.
