History of Photography in Portland
[ 2 Comments ] Posted on 10.28.08 under Portland Art Scene History, Portland Photography, Portland, OR Galleries, Uncategorized
Arch at Agate Beach by Terry Toedtemeier
Portland Photography: Part One
On October 18th the Photography Council of the Portland Art Museum gathered for their quarterly meeting in the new Jubitz Center for Contemporary Art. The agenda for the event was a tour through the center’s new Photography Gallery. This was a cultural water mark for the city and the region.
The turnout for this meeting was the largest in the history of the council. This was due to the excitement generated by the first museum gallery in the Northwest solely dedicated to Photography.
So what’s the big deal about this new gallery and what impact can it have on local and regional culture? The short answer–now people in the Northwest have a facility that offers a context to the importance of photography as an art form.
If the medium was anything other than photography, the new gallery would have received considerable media attention during the gala opening of the Jubitz Center. Instead, it got a footnote brief mention in the Oregonian.
Art centers like New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago regard Photography a defining medium for contemporary art. In the Northwest it is the weak sister to painting, sculpture and original fine prints.
Terry Toedtemeire gave birth to, nurtured, and championed the photography collection at the Portland Art Museum. Terry is first and only Curator of Photography in the history of the museum; a position he has held in for over twenty years.
Starting with relatively small assortment of images with no apparent theme, Terry built a collection that now includes roughly six thousand images. More important, the current collection offers a reasonably narrative of the history of photography and of the significant roll the medium has played in documenting regional history.
The history of Terry’s importance to photography in Portland started before he took a part-time curatorial position at the PAM in the early 80’s. He was one of the five founding members of The Blue Sky Gallery in 1975.
The other four founding members included Ann Hughes, Robert Di Franco, Craig Hickman, and Chris Rauschenberg. Today Blue Sky is one of the oldest collective fine arts galleries in North America.
In the late 70’s and through most of the 80’s The Blue Sky Gallery, The Portland Center for Visual Arts, and The Artists Workshop were all housed in the same Old Town building on N.W. 5th and Davis.
For over a decade they made up the core of the contemporary art scene in Portland.
During this period, Terry began to take the rag tag assortment of photographs in the museum’s vault and build substantial collection. He took on this task in spite of the absence of any funding for acquiring new work.
The project that brought Terry to the museum was the Carlton E. Watkins album “Photographs of the Columbia River”. This leather bound album of mammoth albumen prints was presented to Jay Cook by the Oregon Steam Navigation Company in 1876. There were only three copies produced and is the most important photo documentation of the Columbia River from the second half of the 19th century in existence.
Columbia Gorge - C.E. Watkins
The museum got it on loan from the Oregon State Library on the condition that it would be restored. The restoration project of the Watkins album marked the beginning of Terry’s career with the Portland Art Museum.
Larger cities tend to have the highest concentration photographic talent. However, the community of photo artist that grew out of the Blue Sky Gallery collective helped to cultivate a Portland pool of talent rivaling photo communities in many larger cities. Blue Sky did as many as eighteen shows a year. This amount of energy generated a national buzz among photographers that has grown consistently during the life of the gallery.
Chief PAM Curator Bruce Guenther gave a talk at the gallery as part of the week long 2004 Photo Lucida event. Bruce’s art collection consists primarily of photography. He started his talk by saying,” If a person had bought one or more works from every show Blue Sky show had hung, that person would own a great collection. That collection would be one of the more important photo collections in the country”.
A few adventurous individuals started recognizing the importance of the photography and the opportunities for collecting in Portland. When Terry began his curatorial work at the museum he started building relationships with these maverick collectors.
Terry gave a talk a few years ago where he posed the question “What does a curator do when someone pulls up to the museum with a truck load of photos and offers to donate them all to the museum?” His answer was “Take them all and sort out the mess whenever you get time”.
The photography community consists of a fairly close knit group of people. This applies not only locally, but regionally, nationally and internationally. When he joined the museum staff he got support from John Weber the Curator for Contemporary Arts. John had a strong interest in photography and gave Terry as much encouragement as the meager resources available aloud.
Since photography is a sub-group of prints and works on paper the photography collection was housed with the work in the Gordon Gilkey Print Center. The print center, a virtually a museum within a museum, had developed a national reputation. The center had a surprising amount of autonomy, and since Terry’s office was in the center, he had more freedom than normally found in a museum position.
There were no serious commercial fine art photo galleries in Portland when The Blue Sky Gallery was founded. The first significant commercial venue came in 1984 when Guy Swenson opened The Photographic Image Gallery. Back then there were very few serious collectors of photography in Portland. Guy had to create a new clientele from an unsophisticated and uneducated market. Collectors from outside Portland have always been the primary market for the more serious work Guy sells at his gallery.
Guy was showing work by artist like Ansel Adams, Edward and Brett Weston, Ruth Bernhard, and Imogene Cunningham when their work was still prices in the hundreds of dollars. Unfortunately, the public didn’t understand the work. There were only occasional photo shows at the museum.
There were no serious commercial fine art photo galleries in Portland when The Blue Sky Gallery was founded. The first significant commercial venue came in 1984 when Guy Swenson opened The Photographic Image Gallery. Back then there were very few serious collectors of photography in Portland. Guy had to create a new clientele from an unsophisticated and uneducated market. Collectors from outside Portland have always been the primary market for the more serious work Guy sells at his gallery.
Moonrise Hernandez by Ansel Adams
Guy was showing work by artist like Ansel Adams, Edward and Brett Weston, Ruth Bernhard, and Imogene Cunningham when their work was still prices in the hundreds of dollars. Unfortunately, the public didn’t understand the work. There were only occasional photo shows at the museum.
The lack of photo shows prevented the development of a context for the public to gain an understanding of photography as fine art. Any meaningful context for an artistic medium must come from strong cultural institutions, particularly museums.
When Terry took the curatorial post at PAM he was joining an institution suffering from years of neglect and atrophy. Terry refused to let the museums problems deter his commitment to building a collection.
From the middle 80’s to the early 90’s Blue Sky hung high quality, cutting edge shows by talented emerging artists. These events got photographers and some of the cultural elite buzzing, but drew indifference from the media and the general public.
Guy worked at putting on show by both established and immerging artists. He tended to focused on more decorative work that he believed would have a broader appeal by being more accessible to a wider audience; landscapes and cityscapes. He also consistently offered a few more challenging selection hoping to cultivate serious collectors.
A few other galleries and independent photographers sold mostly the pretty picture stuff that demanded little effort from the public. A few photographers did OK at the Saturday Market and some eventually carved out a respectable market for their work.
Through to the early 90’s Terry slaved away at the museum building relationships with serious collectors, artists from all over the world, and many museum curators. Eventually, he was given full time status as a curator. Portland started gaining a reputation as magnet for talented photo artists.
All this activity went on because of the extraordinary energy and effort of a small group of people. The public had no clue of the significance the local of the local photography scene because of the lack of institutional context. Then a new guy came to town to open a gallery, and all that began to change.
Notes on Collecting: Why Buy Art?
[ 3 Comments ] Posted on 08.12.08 under Uncategorized
me at the computer with three favoites
People buy art for many different reasons. Personally, I buy works of art that I feel a strong connection with, work that teaches me about who I am and the context for the life I live. However, I have to admit that I didn’t start buying art with the purest motives.
I would like to say that I have always collected to surround myself with the power and beauty of deeply meaningful imagery, a collection of very personal icons. It would be nice if I could honestly say that I was pushed forward by a desire to develop a high sense of connoisseurship and a love for fine things. I wish I could proclaim that intellectual curiosity was the driving force behind a life of collecting. I would be proud if I could proclaim that the idea of investing in art for monetary gain seldom crossed my mind. All of these virtuous perspectives evolved within me over the decades I have bought and lived with many amazing works of art, but it didn’t start out that way.
In the beginning I liked art, sure; but I was poor and never thought I could ever buy or own great artwork. When I arrived at the place where I was ready and willing to buy my first original piece, I was deeply preoccupied with wondering how much art could appreciate in its dollar value. The friend sold me my first original painting told me emphatically that buying art wasn’t about investing; she said “it’s about learning who you are.”
I pondered that thought for a bit, and considered the $450 that painting was costing me. In 1982 that was a lot of money for me and my wife Linda, probably around $1500 in today’s dollars. Then again, I couldn’t escape the way that painting made me feel. It was a revelation in my understanding of how a unique and finely crafted object thrilled me in ways I had never imagined. I’m not saying I forgot about the dollar value of the painting any time soon after its purchase. In fact I still track the retail value of that artist’s work. I guess the values is roughly ten times what I paid for it, but that fact is rendered meaningless since I have never even considered selling the piece.
About the art in the picture heading this post: from left to right you see digitally manipulated photo from Diane Kornberg’s first body of digital work; in the middle is a very early piece by Kirk Lybecker which happens to be the first original work of art I ever purchased; the painting on the right is a gouache piece by Claudia Cave.
