Private Collections Salon & Sale

Deborah Turbeville (1932-2013, Boston, MA) arrived in New York at nineteen, drawn toward theater, dance, and literature, interests that would later surface in the staged, narrative quality of her photographs. She was taken on by the designer Claire McCardell as a house model and studio assistant, and through that circle met Diana Vreeland, then editor of Harper's Bazaar, who brought her onto the magazine's staff in 1963. At Bazaar, Turbeville worked alongside Richard Avedon and Diane Arbus, but a 1965 shoot involving Arbus led to litigation and her dismissal. She turned to making her own photographs in the late 1960s, essentially self-taught apart from a six-month workshop she took under Avedon and art director Marvin Israel. Her 1975 swimwear story for American Vogue, shot in a condemned New York bathhouse, established both her reputation and her method at once: models draped listlessly against decaying tile, an image so unlike the polished glamour of the period that it drew accusations ranging from drug references to concentration-camp imagery. She went on to build a body of work defined by soft focus, overexposure, and torn, scratched, or taped prints, developed over decades with her longtime studio collaborator Sharon Schuster. 

Turbeville shot on film and worked extensively in the darkroom and on the studio table afterward, treating the negative and the print as raw material rather than a finished product. She and her longtime collaborator Sharon Schuster frequently distressed finished prints afterward, scratching, tearing, burning, or taping them. 

Bill Brandt  (1904-1983, Hamburg) traveled to Paris in 1929 where he refined his photographic technique in Man Ray’s studio and absorbed the lessons of Surrealism, before settling in London. Through the 1930s he built his reputation with photographs that read as straightforward documentary reportage of British life, contributing regularly to magazines including Lilliput and Picture Post and producing landmark social-documentary work on Depression-era mining communities in the north of England. After the Second World War, Brandt turned his attention inward: in 1945 he acquired a Kodak wide-angle camera built for police crime-scene work and began an extended project photographing the nude in domestic interiors, first in his own flat and others' apartments on Campden Hill, in Belgravia, and elsewhere in London. The camera's fixed focus and extreme, 110-degree angle of view produced images with radically compressed and exaggerated perspective, an effect Brandt described as letting him see "like a mouse, a fish or a fly.” He pursued the project for roughly fifteen years, later extending it to the beaches of East Sussex and northern France with a Hasselblad Superwide camera, and gathered ninety of the resulting images into Perspective of Nudes in 1961. In his later years he also taught photography at the Royal College of Art and curated an exhibition on twentieth-century landscape photography for the Victoria and Albert Museum in 1975.

Ryan McGinley (b. 1977, New Jersey) moved to New York in 1996 to study graphic design at Parsons School of Design, graduating with a BFA in 2000. While still a student he began photographing the friends, lovers, and downtown nightlife acquaintances around him on Polaroid film, eventually papering the walls of his East Village apartment with the results and, in 1999, compiling a self-published book of the images titled The Kids Are Alright.  A copy reached Sylvia Wolf, a curator of photography at the Whitney Museum of American Art, who organized an exhibition of the work at the museum in 2003. McGinley was 25 at the time, making him one of the youngest artists ever to have a solo show there. The same year, American Photo magazine named him Photographer of the Year. The Whitney show launched McGinley into a different mode of working. Rather than continuing to document his existing circle as he found them, he began directing friends and, later, scouted models through more deliberately composed scenes, a shift that reached its fullest expression in the cross-country road trips he began organizing from the mid-2000s onward, in which vanloads of young collaborators were photographed nude across the American landscape over the course of a summer. The pictures read as candid, but McGinley has been open about how deliberately they are built. He has compared the process to skateboarding: making a trick look effortless takes exhaustive practice, and on the road trips he would shoot far more film than he needed, testing setups and letting his cast move through a location until a shot arrived that looked unplanned. A retrospective description of the method calls it "staged and spontaneous" at once, a slow build-up of repetition and direction that clears the way for a single, unrepeatable moment of chance, arrived at only after extensive setup. 

In 2007 the International Center of Photography recognized this body of work with its Young Photographer Infinity Award. McGinley's work is held in public collections including the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Smithsonian's National Portrait Gallery, and he was honored in 2009 at the Young Collectors Council's Artists Ball at the Guggenheim Museum. He continues to live and work in New York.

Graciela Iturbide (b. 1942, Mexico City) was born the eldest of thirteen children in a traditional Catholic family. Exposed to photography early in life, she got her first camera at age 11. In 1969, at the age of twenty-seven, she enrolled at the Centro Universitario de Estudios Cinematográficos (part of the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México) intending to become a film director. There she studied under Manuel Álvarez Bravo, the pioneering Mexican modernist photographer. In 1970, Iturbide turned decisively toward still photography after the death of her six-year-old daughter. From 1970 to 1971 she worked as Álvarez Bravo's assistant, traveling with him throughout Mexico. She has credited him with teaching her that "there is always time for the pictures you want.” 

In 1978 the Ethnographic Archive of Mexico's National Indigenous Institute commissioned Iturbide to photograph the Seri people of the Sonoran Desert, resulting in the series Los que viven en la arena (Those Who Live in the Sand) and her widely reproduced image Mujer Ángel (Angel Woman), 1979. Between 1979 and 1988 she made a series of visits to Juchitan, Mexico, where she photographed the way of life there “in complicity with the people.” Since the early twentieth century, the women of Juchitan have been national symbols, and Iturbide's photographs capture them in public and in private as they conduct their lives in this ancient city in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec. The series documents a culture in which women hold central economic and social roles, and where diverse gender identities and sexualities are embraced. The photographs reflect Iturbide’s distinctive approach, combining the sensibilities of documentary with moments of dreamlike intensity and constructed imagery.

Doris Ulmann (1882-1934, New York) was educated at the Ethical Culture Fieldston School and went on to study psychology and law at Columbia University's Teachers College, where she came under the instruction of photographer Clarence H. White, a founding member of Alfred Stieglitz's Photo-Secession and a leading figure of the Pictorialist movement. When White founded his own school, the Clarence H. White School of Photography, in 1914, Ulmann enrolled and pursued photography with new seriousness, joining the Pictorial Photographers of America, an organization she co-founded with her then-husband, orthopedic surgeon Dr. Charles H. Jaeger, also a Pictorialist photographer. By 1918 Ulmann had turned to portraiture as her primary focus, using her Park Avenue apartment as a studio to photograph members of New York's literary, artistic, and scientific elite. figures including William Butler Yeats, Albert Einstein, Martha Graham, Anna Pavlova, and Paul Robeson. Beginning around 1925, she started traveling beyond New York to photograph Dunkard, Mennonite, and Shaker communities, and by the late 1920s she was making regular summer trips into Appalachia and the Gullah communities of coastal South Carolina. 

Ulmann worked with a large-format view camera and soft-focus portrait lens throughout her career. She she favors platinum printing for its long tona rage and matte, velvety surface. Roughly half of the 304 matted prints in her primary archive (at the University of Oregon) are platinum prints personally mounted and signed by Ulmann.