Midtown Y Photography Gallery was a pioneering nonprofit organisation in New York that offered photographers an opportunity to publicly exhibit their work. The Gallery ran from 1972 until 1996 directed in turn by photographers Larry Siegel, Sy Rubin and Michael Spano. [1]
Larry Siegel, with the help of Robert Menschel and NYSCA, founded the Midtown Y Photography Gallery in 1972 as a corridor gallery at the Emanu-El Midtown YM-YWHA on 14th Street. Larry Siegel had previously established the Image Gallery, which along with Helen Gee’s Limelight Gallery was one of the few venues in New York City, apart from the Museum of Modern Art, that held photography exhibitions in the 1950s and early 1960s. [2]
Though it occasionally showed historical photographs, and established contemporary practitioners such as David Attie and Robert Giard during its first decade, the Midtown Y Photography Gallery concentrated on promoting the work of emerging artists. [3] It issued open calls for participation in large thematic exhibitions but most often selected exhibitors by conducting portfolio reviews, the work being shown alongside that of one or two other photographers. For most, this was their first “solo” exposure in New York or their first public display of work. Some returned subsequently to show later work.
The Midtown Y Photography Gallery Archive, bequeathed to The New York Public Library in 1998, is housed in the Photography Collection of The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, [6] and in the Manuscripts and Archives Division. [7]
Berenice Alice Abbott was an American photographer best known for her portraits of cultural figures of the interwar period, New York City photographs of architecture and urban design of the 1930s, and science interpretation of the 1940s to the 1960s.
Gordon Roger Alexander Buchanan Parks was an American photographer, composer, author, poet, and film director, who became prominent in U.S. documentary photojournalism in the 1940s through 1970s—particularly in issues of civil rights, poverty and African Americans—and in glamour photography. He is best remembered for his iconic photos of poor Americans during the 1940s, for his photographic essays for Life magazine, and as the director of the films Shaft, Shaft's Big Score and the semiautobiographical The Learning Tree.
Garry Winogrand was an American street photographer, known for his portrayal of U.S. life and its social issues, in the mid-20th century. Photography curator, historian, and critic John Szarkowski called Winogrand the central photographer of his generation.
The International Center of Photography (ICP), at 79 Essex Street on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, New York City, consists of a museum for photography and visual culture and a school offering an array of educational courses and programming. ICP's photographic collection, reading room, and archives are at Mana Contemporary in Jersey City, New Jersey. The organization was founded by Cornell Capa in 1974.
David Goldblatt HonFRPS was a South African photographer noted for his portrayal of South Africa during the period of apartheid. After apartheid had ended he concentrated more on the country's landscapes. What differentiates Goldblatt's body of work from those of other anti-apartheid artists is that he photographed issues that went beyond the violent events of apartheid and reflected the conditions that led up to them. His forms of protest have a subtlety that traditional documentary photographs may lack: "[M]y dispassion was an attitude in which I tried to avoid easy judgments. . . . This resulted in a photography that appeared to be disengaged and apolitical, but which was in fact the opposite." He has numerous publications to his name.
Raghubir Singh (1942–1999) was an Indian photographer, most known for his landscapes and documentary-style photographs of the people of India. He was a self-taught photographer who worked in India and lived in Paris, London and New York. During his career he worked with National Geographic Magazine, The New York Times, The New Yorker and Time. In the early 1970s, he was one of the first photographers to reinvent the use of color at a time when color photography was still a marginal art form.
Rosalind Fox Solomon is an American photographer based in New York City.
Laurence Bruce Fink was an American photographer and educator, best known for his black-and-white images of people at parties and in other social situations.
Robert Giard was an American portrait, landscape, and figure photographer.
Charles Robert Gatewood was an American photographer, writer, videographer, artist and educator, who lived and worked in San Francisco, California.
Helen Gee (1919–2004) was an American photography gallery owner, co-owner of the Limelight in New York City, New York from 1954 to 1961. It was New York City's first important post-war photography gallery, pioneering sales of photographs as art.
David Attie was a prominent American photographer, widely published in magazines and books from the late 1950s until his passing in the 1980s. He was one of the last great proteges of legendary photography teacher and art director Alexey Brodovitch. Attie worked in a wide range of styles, illustrating everything from novels to magazine and album covers to subway posters, and taking now-iconic portraits of Truman Capote, Bobby Fischer, Lorraine Hansberry, and many others. He also created the first-ever visual depiction of Holly Golightly, the main character in Breakfast at Tiffany's, when he illustrated the Capote novella's first appearance in Esquire Magazine. He was best known in his lifetime for his signature photo montages—an approach he called "multiple-image photography": highly inventive, pre-Photoshop collages that he made by combining negatives in the darkroom. His work has received new attention with a pair of posthumous books: the well-reviewed 2015 publication of his Capote collaboration "Brooklyn: A Personal Memoir, With The Lost Photographs of David Attie," and the 2021 collection of his behind-the-scenes photographs from the very first season of Sesame Street, "The Unseen Photos of Street Gang." He has been the subject of several solo exhibits in recent years, including a two-year retrospective at the Brooklyn Historical Society. One recent critic wrote that even decades later, "his explorations of photomontage remain durably inspired, innovative, and visually dynamic."
Cervin Robinson was an American photographer and author best known for architectural photography and historical writings that span his career, active from 1957 to his death.
The Laurence Miller Gallery is a contemporary art gallery in New York City, and has been described as "one of the longest-running American galleries devoted to photography".
Robert B. Menschel (1930-2022) was an American investment banker and philanthropist. He had a 50 year relationship with Goldman Sachs as a Partner or Senior Director. The author of a financial book, and the winner of the 2015 Carnegie Medal of Philanthropy.
Harry Lapow was an American photographer and graphic designer.
The Photographers' Gallery and Workshop (1973–2010) was an Australian photography gallery established in South Yarra, Melbourne, and which ran almost continuously for nearly 40 years. Its representation, in the 1970s and 1980s, of contemporary and mid-century, mostly American and some European original fine prints from major artists was influential on Australian audiences and practitioners, while a selection of the latter's work sympathetic to the gallery ethos was shown alternately and then dominated the program.
Frank Hunter is an American documentary and fine-art photographer and university educator. He is known for his photographic landscapes and his mastery of the platinum/palladium process. His interest in photographic processes includes the technical process of exposure and development as well as the psychological and spiritual aspects of creating photographic work. "Hunter has always been famed for transforming the utterly familiar to something rich and strange."
Calvin Robert Hicks (1941-2012) was an African American photographer and gallerist, best known for founding The Black Photographers of California and its associated exhibition space, the Black Gallery, in Los Angeles, as well as for his classical nude portraiture from the 1970s.
Bernard Pierre Wolff was a French-born American photographer. In the 1950s and 1960s he worked as an art director, and from the 1970s worked as a photographer travelling and taking photographs of people. He made street photographs in New York City in the 1970s. His photographs of monumental sculpture were used as cover artwork for music by Joy Division in 1980. All of his work is held by the Maison européenne de la photographie in Paris, which exhibited it in 2017.