Anne Wilkes Tucker
We asked Tucker to choose 10 images from shows that held personal meaning. We added two because her life in pictures has yielded great stories.
1. Ansel Adams’ “Winter Sunrise, Sierra Nevada from Lone Pine, California” (1944, silver gelatin print)
Tucker’s first show at the museum, “The Target Collection of American Photography” (1977), featured the institution’s first major photography gift, donated 10 months before she was hired. “We wanted the exhibition to include images that were iconic and would be familiar to the public as well as those that would be new and sometimes challenging,” Tucker said.
Patrons Joan and Stanford Alexander, who
directed the Target gift to Houston, remain avid supporters. They’ve funded the Anne Wilkes Tucker Center for Photography, a study center that will be built in the Audrey Jones Beck Building. Target gave the museum seven increasingly generous grants, resulting in six more exhibitions and “some of the most profound and beautiful works in the collection, the foundation of the museum’s American photography holdings,” Tucker said.
2. William Wegman’s “Bathroom Rug” (1972, gelatin silver print, collaged 1975)
Lewis Baltz curated the 1977 show “Contemporary American Photographic Works.” Tucker co-wrote the catalog. “It was an important introduction to many artists who worked in photography but did not consider themselves to be photographers, including John Baldesarri and William Wegman,” Tucker said. Later, Wegman developed his signature, using his dog Man Ray as the subject of endless portraits.
3. Esther Parada’s “Past Recovery” (1979, gelatin silver prints with toning)
The 1982 show “Target III: In Sequence” posited that “All photographs are sequences, essentially two or more photographs in one indivisible work.” Esther Parada’s “Past Recovery” compresses family memory into one large piece, 96 inches by 144 inches. “There are multiple exposures into the images of the same person at three different ages, or of two people who never met from the same family but look alike. All of this was done before Photoshop,” Tucker said.
4. Ray Metzker’s “City Whispers: Philadelphia” (1983, gelatin silver print, edition 8/30)
Tucker taught at Philadelphia College of Art with Ray Metzker. Preparing his first mid-career retrospective, 1985’s “Unknown Territory: Photographs by Ray K. Metzker 1957–1983,” was a treat. “This marvelous picture he delivered to the museum just as the catalog was finished. We all agreed that we had to find room for it. What wonderful serendipity to capture these pedestrians so perfectly split by the slice of light,” she said.
5. An untitled image by Anne Tucker of a man she knew in Louisiana who was also photographed by Robert
Frank. Robert Frank was one of the first artists whose work Tucker collected for herself, partly because he’d captured an itenerent preacher she recognized. During her childhood, the preacher beckoned people to be baptized in the Mississippi River; Tucker herself had waded in for the experience and photographed him. She co-curated 1986’s “Robert Frank: New York to Nova Scotia” with Philip Brookman, the museum’s contribution to the first year of FotoFest exhibitions. A retrospective of Frank’s films and photographs, it included selected prints from Frank’s iconic series “The Americans,” which the museum had just acquired.
6. Joel Sternfeld’s “McLean, Virginia” (December 1978, dye imbibition print, printed March 1982)
With “American Prospects: The Photographs of Joel Sternfeld” in 1987, Tucker gave the first museum exhibition to an artist who helped establish color photography as a respected medium. The show’s catalog proved so popular it’s been reprinted twice.
7. Jaromír Funke’s “Eye Reflection from the cycle ‘Time Persists’” (1932, gelatin silver print)
“One of the greatest gifts of my years at the museum was the opportunity to travel to places I never dreamed I would go — Czechoslovakia when it was still Communist, Argentina, Venezuela, Brazil, Mexico, all over Japan, across China following the Great Wall and many of the major cities of Europe,” Tucker said. “Jaromír Funke’s ‘Eye Reflection’ was one of the great wealth of Czech photographs that we were able to acquire from my many trips to Prague and other Czech cities preparing this exhibition.” It appeared in the 1989-90 show “Czech Modernism: 1900-1945,” co-curated with Alison de Lima Greene, Ralph McKay and Jaroslav Andel.
8. Brassaï’s 1949 “PontNeuf Paris” is a promised gift from the collection of the museum’s photography subcommittee chair James Edward Maloney and Beverly Ann Young.
“Because Brassaï photographed every bridge across the Seine in Paris, I walked the distance of the Seine through the city on both sides, looking at where he might have stood, what had changed, what remained,” Tucker said. This image appeared on the back cover of the catalog for the 1998-99
During 39 years, as the museum grew from a modest provincial institution, she built of one of the world’s great photography collections. When (Tucker) arrived in 1976, the museum owned 141 images. Today, the collection holds 30,000 works.
show “The Eye of Paris.”
9. Shomei Tomatsu’s “Beer Bottle After the Atomic Bomb Explosion from the series 11: 02 Nagasaki” (1961, gelatin silver print, printed later)
New York collector Allan Chasanoff called Tucker out of the blue in the early 1990s to donate 900 photographs. “He had major works by Irving Penn and some of the really tough Robert Mapplethorpes, works I’m not sure I could have ever bought,” she said. This image from Chasanoff’s collection was included in the landmark 2003 show “The History of Japanese Photography,” which Tucker co-curated with Dana Friis-Hansen, Joe Takeba and Ryuichi Kaneko.
10. Dmitri Baltermants’ “Attack— Eastern Front WWII” (1941, gelatin silver print, printed 1960)
“One of great discoveries of ‘War/Photography: Images of Armed Conflict and Its Aftermath’ was the incredible work of the Russian photographers who covered World War II and many others who are working today,” Tucker said. She spent a decade researching the 2012-13 landmark exhibition, co-curated with Will Michels and Natalie Zelt.
11. Irving Penn’s “Anne Wilkes Tucker, New York,” (2003, Gelatin silver print) (on cover)
Tucker’s friendship with the German collector Manfred Heiting helped put the museum’s photog- raphy department on the map. She happened to be in New York dealer Peter MacGill’s gallery the day MacGill contracted to sell Heiting’s 4,000-piece collection.
Through a gift-purchase arrangement, the museum acquired the first half, spanning the years 1918 to the present, in 2002; it bought the remainder, focused on 19th-century works, to years later. It could have ended there, but Heiting, a consummate collector, couldn’t stop. With income from the sales, he built another trove of 10,000 rare photography books, which the museum acquired in 2010.
“He has continued to donate photographs, purchase photographs for the museum and donate books and ceramics,” Tucker said. Heiting also commissioned a 2003 portrait of Tucker by Irving Penn.
“The gift for me in that was not the portrait but getting to watch Mr. Penn work. He wouldn’t talk about how he worked,” she said. Penn told her to wear a hat and a scarf to the shoot. When she arrived, he asked, ‘Where are the others?’”
“Other what?” she responded.
“Hats and scarves,” he said.
When she said there weren’t any more, he remarked, “You’re not Hollywood.”
“We knew that,” she said.
“Eventually, the hat went, the scarf went, the jewelry went; and what I’m doing in that photograph is holding the collar of my blouse up against my neck. He kept simplifying and simplifying. It was two hours,” she said.
Penn was a friend she adored. “We had lost spouses at the same time, and it was a bonding for us,” she said. “He once told me with great pride that his wife, the great model Lisa Fonssagrives, could hold a pose for hours. So you think I was going to move a muscle while I was sitting on that stool with the light in my eyes? Not an ounce.”
12. Richard Avedon’s “Dovima with Elephants, Evening Dress by Dior, Cirque d’Hiver, Paris, August 1955”
This large, spectacular print is among the promised gifts on view through Oct. 11 in the show “In Appreciation: Gifts in Honor of Anne Wilkes Tucker.” Karen Kelsey Duddlesten is donating it. It brings to mind one of Tucker’s best stories. The morn- ing before the opening of “Contemporary American Photographic Works,” the printer’s sales rep called Tucker to say the catalog would be late. He told her an elephant had gotten lose in the bindery.
“I could only say that I didn’t believe him,” Tucker said. “He said, ‘I’ve been lying to people my entire life as a salesman, and the one time I’m trying to tell the truth no one will believe me. It so happens they were unloading the circus. An elephant got loose and ran down the railroad track into the first open door it found. Which happened to be the bindery.’
“Now, an elephant can do a great deal of damage in a bindery,” Tucker said. “So for years, if anything at the museum was late, it was the elephant’s fault.”