Looking forward, looking back
ANDREW SMITH MOVES HIS TREASURE TROVE OF PHOTOGRAPHS TO TUCSON
Andrew Smith moves his treasure trove of photographs to Tucson
FOR fans of photography, it’s an overwhelmingly blissful experience to walk around upstairs in the old house at 122 Grant Avenue. Look one way and there’s a giant print of Storm Over La
Bajada, one of Laura Gilpin’s photos in her remarkable documentation of the Río Grande. Around a corner is a nearly life-size print of Billie Holiday by Herman Leonard. There are also big prints of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico and other stunning Ansel Adams images, of John Lennon and Yoko
Ono, New York City by Annie Leibovitz, and antique prints by 19th-century photographers of the American West, including Alexander Gardner, Edward S. Curtis, William Henry Jackson, and Adam C. Vroman.
The Andrew Smith Gallery is a treasure trove Santa Fe has enjoyed for 23 years, but it will soon be gone. “We’re clearing out at the end of September. We’re moving everything,” Andy Smith said during a recent visit. “We’re older, my wife wants to live someplace warmer, and Tucson is warmer.” He has found new quarters — 1,600 square feet at 439 N. Sixth Avenue in downtown Tucson. “I kind of want to run it more as an office than a gallery, but inevitably it will be a combination.”
Smith has had his gallery in Santa Fe since moving it from Albuquerque in 1995. The breadth and depth of the exhibitions held over the years is told in the archive of press releases written by his longtime curator, Liz Kay. An especially interesting one was The End of the Trail: Photographic Fin-de-Siècle SelfPortrait Show, which opened in late December 1999. It was also a celebration of the gallery’s “quarter of a century of showing, buying, and selling photography” and had works by 26 artists, among them Paul Caponigro, Judy Chicago, Lee Friedlander, Betty Hahn, Duane Michals, Delilah Montoya, Joseph Traugott, and Barbara Van Cleve. Smith sold his first photographs in 1974.
“We have represented hundreds of photographers,” Smith said. “We have sold hundreds of thousands of pictures. We probably had over a million people come and look at photography over the years, making it the most popular photography gallery in the world.” The 1980s and ’90s constituted the gallery’s heyday. Since then, the internet and art fairs have impacted the business tremendously. So has a slide in visual literacy. “People can’t tell the difference. People come in and think that they’re looking at reproductions.
“What we’ve seen in the last few years is a diminishment of knowledge by people coming into the gallery. Most people who come in think I took all the pictures. The most common question I get is, ‘When did you start taking pictures and how come they’re so expensive?’ I’m not sure if it’s the internet or the way people consume images now or the way they’re taught.”
Smith started his business scouting photographs for Jack Potter (the father of veteran Santa Fe book dealer Nicholas Potter) in 1972. “Nick’s dad gave Andy some Edward Curtis prints when Andy was in college and told him he’d give him a percentage if he could sell them,” said Kay, who has been with the gallery since 1984. “That was the start of the whole thing.”
“We got into this business through the book dealers, because they had all the photographs,” Smith said. “I’d go out and see Jake Zeitlin at Zeitlin & Ver Brugge, in
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Andrew Smith Gallery,
continued from Page 36 Los Angeles, who had drawers full of Edward Westons and things like that.” Photography’s alliance with the book world goes back to the 19th century. “When Eadweard Muybridge first came to this country in the 1850s, he was a book and print distributor. The two went together, because photographs were made into albums. Book dealers is where all the great photos were. But at the same time, the photography business as we know it was being invented in New York and Washington.”
Alfred Stieglitz’s An American Place gallery, which opened in New York in 1929, was a significant hingepoint in the medium’s evolution to framed prints displayed on walls like paintings. And the person who took the mantle from Stieglitz was Ansel Adams, one of the stalwarts of Andrew Smith Gallery. Adams was a brilliant, dedicated photographer, but his fame also echoed his big personality and his prolific writing. “Besides his books, he wrote over 3,000 memos to Edwin Land at Polaroid on technical issues,” Smith said.
The fact that photographs are almost always produced in multiples represents another similarity to books. And so surely the high price of Adams-made prints of Moonrise, Hernandez means that he didn’t make that many? “There are 1,200,” Smith countered. “And they sell from anywhere from $50,000 to $1.5 million. He was immensely popular, and so was Edward Curtis. Curtis’ publication had 2,200 images and it was an edition of 300, so he actually manufactured over 600,000 images.”
Despite the success of An American Place, which closed in 1946, Smith said the idea of a photography gallery did not really take hold for years. “The first gallery was probably Helen Gee’s [Limelight, which opened in New York in 1954], then there was a gallery in Boston called Carl Siembab and Lee Witkin opened his [Witkin Gallery, New York] in 1969 and the industry picked up from there. The first photo gallery in Santa Fe was Gallery F22, started by Ellie Scott [in 1969].”
“Andy started in a little storefront off of Carlisle and Constitution in Albuquerque, then he moved to Romero Street in Old Town,” Kay recalled. “Annie Leibovitz was one of our first shows, in 1985. She was famous, but she still came to the house and cleaned up beer with a mop when she spilled it: a very downto-earth person. Everybody came to the openings. It was just this really dynamic, vibrant community in the 1980s.
“We always represented the UNM photographers. Patrick Nagatani — practically the day he started teaching at the University of New Mexico, he walked in our gallery and we hit it off and we had show after show. Patrick died last year, and Andy just took on his entire archive. Barbara Van Cleve was another. She walked into the gallery in Old Town and she’s still with us.”
About dealing photography in Albuquerque in the 1980s, Kay said, “We just happened to hit it at the right time.” However, by the next decade, Smith noticed a commercial glow up in Santa Fe. “In Old Town, we learned that Albuquerque people wouldn’t buy from galleries there; it was more prestigious to buy from galleries in Santa Fe. So we ended up wholesaling prints to galleries in Santa Fe and then we moved here in 1995.” The operation was first in a space above Owings-Dewey Fine Art on the Plaza, then moved to 203 West San Francisco Street, across from Evangelo’s. The dealer added a gallery in the historic house at 122 Grant in 2007 and had two locations until closing the San Francisco Street store in 2009.
By then, Smith was traveling not only around the country but around the world on photography missions. “Most of what we do is with established collectors, or we go and visit institutions and collectors and artists,” he said. “I average 3,000 to 5,000 miles a month traveling. Most of the shows we did were contemporary photographers, but the main part of the business was dealing with collectors and institutions and finding the most important 19th-century photography. Throughout my career, I’ve focused on collections of western American photography such that we are the source for that internationally.”
He brought out a Thomas Easterly daguerreotype, saying, “These are the first photographs ever made of the American Indians, made at the Easterly studio in St. Louis.” Then he pointed to a salt print, made in about 1860, titled Spokane Chief & Wife. “This is one of my favorites. It’s one of the most compelling pictures I’ve ever had.”
Smith’s sensitivity to art came from his parents. They were both from New York and were both doctors, his father a radiologist and his mother a pediatrician. “My father was stationed at Bruns Hospital here in World War II. My mother got polio from one of her patients when she was pregnant with me, so they shipped us both off to Chicago. I was born there.” But Smith was raised in Santa Fe, the son of parents who appreciated art. “I grew up looking at pictures and listening to music in that kind of New York culture that was out here. They’d take us to the opera.”
His family today is Claire Smith and two daughters, Ariel and Holly. He met Claire at an Albuquerque Dukes baseball game in 1983. “At the time I was also a really bad lawyer. I’d gone to law school after I started the business and I had a street practice where I would charge people a hundred bucks for a divorce and they wouldn’t pay me because they didn’t have it. One of the things Claire and I had in common was that her father had polio.”
During our interview on Aug. 14, Smith picked up his “Studemino” from the New Old Trail Garage. The car is a hybrid El Camino and Studebaker created by John Gonzales of Las Vegas. After a Plaza cruise that drew appreciative glances, I asked Smith about interesting clients. “One of my colleagues in New Orleans had a big Linda McCartney show in 1993 or 1994. We were there and Paul and Linda were there. He was the most charming man ever, the nicest guy I’ve
“Annie Leibovitz was one of our first shows, in 1985. She was famous, but she still came to the house and cleaned up beer with a mop when she spilled it: a very down-to-earth person.” — Andrew Smith Gallery curator Liz Kay
ever met in the world. He did come to Santa Fe on his way to Tucson, where he had a home. We had some of Linda’s old prints and he wanted to buy those, so he was at the gallery.”
He took the opportunity to laud his staff, including Kay and John Boland, who also worked with him for more than 30 years. “He’s now at Manitou Gallery and is one of the best technical experts on photographic process in the country.”
Smith said he is continuing with a project, Emerging Artists on Medicare, that he started in 2010. “Over the years, as photographers have aged, we’re looking at their work more as archival work than doing shows, dealing with their legacy. When family members inherit materials, it can be a burden — for one reason, because 99.9 percent of photographers may have done great work but they don’t have a market. It’s finding a home for them.
“For Barbara Van Cleve, we’re placing her work with the Montana Historical Society. Joan Myers and Gus Foster, we’re placing at the Beinecke Rare Books and Manuscripts Library at Yale. If it’s pictures in New Mexico, the landscape and the art movements, there can be a reason for collecting, and one of the places we did a push was the Photo Archives at the Palace of the Governors, which is one of this state’s great treasures. The Medicare legacy program was a personal initiative, and the first place we really made headway was the Photo Archives with Fran Levine, Mary Anne Redding, and Daniel Kosharek.
“We’re trying to place archives,” Smith said. “In some cases, we’re selling them, and in some cases, the artists are giving them. It’s matchmaking. I’m working with different organizations like the American Photography Archives Group in New York. Our project also involves oral histories, so people will be able to interpret the work and hear what the artist has to say.”
Smith is keeping his basic library of about 1,500 books, but he sold some and made a substantial donation to the New Mexico School for the Arts. Another major gift was a large collection to the Photo Archives, starting in the 1990s. “My favorite is an Alexander Gardner picture of Inscription Rock. We also gave a substantial amount of materials to the College of Santa Fe, starting in the late 1990s. It’s a teaching collection and an exhibition collection. Since the college [Santa Fe University of Art and Design] closed, it’s in limbo and kind of abandoned and we’re very disappointed. It was a gift to the people of Santa Fe. It includes prints by Fox Talbot, Lee Friedlander, and Harry Callahan. The city owns it but hasn’t quite figured out what to do with it. We’re hopeful that the new mayor and city council will realize its importance.”
He thinks of that collection as a key to visual literacy. “Dealing with the tactile nature of the actual objects is something that seems to be lost for people who get all their information on screens,” Smith said. “So my hope is that the city can help with this visual literacy, because it helps people live. It helps people understand how the photographs were made, and it helps people understand when they’re imitating other work, if they’re artists. There are a lot of good things that can come out of it, educationally and just understanding the world around us.”