Henry Cavill in red cape - Qatar Tribune

Saturday, June 8, 2013
ART
He captured modern art,
and now is letting it go
The absence of
captions and a
lack of storage
space have
discouraged
several institutions
from accepting
the archive
D James Dee
NYT SYNDICATE
Colour transparencies of photographs taken by D James Dee, known as the SoHo photographer, in
New York, recently.
HELP yourself to D James Dee’s
luscious, sprawling photographic
archive of the modern
New York art scene. He has
about 250,000 colour transparencies
and slides, ranging in size from 35
millimeter to 8 by 10 inches, documenting
the work of almost every important artist of
the past 40 years and installations at some
of the most influential galleries. And, yes,
he’s giving them away.
All you’ll need is a truck large enough to
hold 65 cardboard file boxes. It would help
if you represent a nonprofit organisation,
because Dee hopes to receive a tax deduction
for donating his life’s work. But that’s
not a deal breaker. You should, however, be
conversant with modern American art
history. Really conversant.
Almost none of the transparencies
and slides are labelled.
Dee, 68, has retired after a
39-year career as the SoHo Photographer,
documenting work for artists,
galleries, exhibitions, books and
portfolios. He is leasing his space at 12
Wooster St, just north of Canal Street,
and moving with his wife, Sarala, to Miami.
The moving vans will arrive on July 24. The
photo collection will not come with him.
“It has value to someone,” Dee said last
week. “Not to me.” The absence of captions
and a lack of storage space have discouraged
several institutions from accepting the
archive. The National Gallery of Art, Getty
Images, and the Fales Library and Special
Collections of New York University have
declined his offer, Dee said.
With that, he illustrated the strengths
and weaknesses of an unlabelled archive by
pulling stacks of 4-inch-by-5-inch transparencies
from a box marked “1984-85 Trans.”
and dealing them like playing cards onto a
light table, identifying each one as best he
could:
“Basquiat. Julian Schnabel.
Don’t know. There was an artist,
Mierle Ukeles; this was
an installation she
had at the
sanitation
transfer station. Joel Shapiro.
Basquiat. I remember doing this shoot, but
I don’t remember the artist. This is a Frank
Gehry. Joel Shapiro. Nam June Paik. This
was for the Chase Bank; it’s 45 feet long.
Oh, who’s the artist? Vincent Arcilesi. This,
I have no idea. I like it, though. I like it. This
is probably an installation; it’s subversive
enough, it could be Ronald Feldman.”
The informality of the filing system is
a bit shocking at first, until Dee explains
exactly what these transparencies and slides
are. They were just-in-case exposures:
just in case a frame was damaged during
processing, just in case it was badly exposed
or slightly fogged or a little too cyan.
“If someone wanted four transparencies,
I’d have a fifth shot,” Dee said. “If they ordered
10 slides, I’d shoot 12. It was cheaper
to shoot extras than to go back and reshoot.
Instead of throwing them out, I put them
in a box.” One box followed the next, until
there were 65, not counting all the blackand-white
negatives, which are also yours
for the taking.
Graham Nickson, the dean of the New
York Studio School of Drawing, Painting
and Sculpture, said of Dee: “He worked with
so many artists in the ‘70s, ‘80s, ‘90s and up
to the present. The people he has shot and
helped, in terms of documenting their
work, are legion.”
“He was literally the
best photographer
in town in terms
of dealing with
colour,” Nickson
said. “For artists, that
density of colour is very
important, and he was very
good working with anything large.” That included
paintings by Nickson himself, which
can range up to 20 feet long.
Dee said his strength was translating
three-dimensional sculpture into two-dimensional
imagery. “My goal is to find
an angle that summarises the piece and
then the light that will describe it,” he said.
“My goal is that when someone looks at
the photograph, they will say, ‘That’s a
great sculpture’ - not, ‘That’s a great
photo.’”
Dee entered into his specialised calling
in 1974 after earning an MFA from Ohio
University. He was invited to photograph
a George Segal sculpture for a monograph.
Segal suggested that Dee get into the business
of photographing artwork.
Borrowing Segal’s Sinar 4-by-5 view
camera, Dee set up shop at 72 Wooster St. “I
grew with SoHo,” he recalled. “As it exploded
in the 1980s, my business did too.”
He worked with artists and with gallery
owners like Brooke Alexander, Mary Boone,
Paula Cooper, Feldman, Ivan Karp, Louis K
Meisel and Annina Nosei.
He bought a five-story building at 12
Wooster St in 1982, converted it into a coop
and occupied the first and second floors.
A decade later business began plummeting
as the art market collapsed and galleries
stopped documenting artists’ portfolios.
A decade after that, digital photography
upended what business remained.
Now Dee wants to pursue his own photography
without the distractions or demands
of a commercial studio. His artwork
is focused on the intimate details of the
human body, both anatomical and imposed
- tattoos, piercings and scarification.