Interview with Gallerist Bonni Benrubi

Although noted at present for her contemporary photographers, gallerist Bonni Benrubi of New York City has included vintage work by such twentieth-century masters as Lewis Hine, Walker Evans, and Andreas Feininger in her holdings. Her roster of living artists includes Abelardo Morell, Massimo Vitali, Matthew Pillsbury, Simon Norfolk, Paolo Pellegrin, Karine Laval, Laura McPhee, Georges Dambier, and Louis Stettner, among many others. Adopting an attitude of strong commitment to her artists, she has worked with collectors, galleries, and institutions around the world on behalf of the photographers’ careers. The gallery assists both beginning and veteran collectors by locating, buying, and selling work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century established and emerging photographers.

Owner and director Bonni Benrubi of Bonni Benrubi Gallery founded her business in 1987 on the Upper East Side of New York City. At present located on 57th Street at Madison Avenue in the well-known Fuller Building, the gallery specializes exclusively in photographs, both contemporary and vintage. With over thirty-two years of experience in the field, Benrubi is one of the most respected gallerists in the city.

Could you please tell us about your background?
I was born in the Bronx and lived in the Bronx for three years, after which my family moved to Fort Lee, New Jersey. I went to college at Boston University in 1971, knowing that I wanted to be an art dealer. I began immediately with art history. I took advantage of all the schools around Boston, including Harvard and the Museum School, to take ancillary courses on art history and photography. I interned at Carl Siembab Gallery in 1973. He was one of the first, one of the very, very first photo dealers. He let me take pictures out of the gallery to show to my Egyptian studies class at the Museum School, things like Felice Beatos and Francis Friths, because the value of these pictures was very low at the time. I graduated from college in 1975 and moved to New York City. I went to work for Irving Blum and Joe Hellman at Blum Helman Gallery for two years. I consider Irving Blum a mentor.

What was the specialty of Blum Helman?
Blum Helman Gallery was very closely connected to Leo Castelli, so it was during the heyday of Pop Art. They represented people like Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Robert Rauschenberg. I met and dealt with these amazing artists, and the clients, who were also amazing. I was 22 years old, and just absorbed everything. Then I applied for a job at Daniel Wolf Gallery in November of 1977, and began to work in December.

What made you decide originally to go to the Daniel Wolf Gallery? Was it attraction to photography?
Yes. Because when I worked at Blum Helman, where they represented extraordinary artists like Ellsworth Kelly and Jasper Johns, Irving and Joe were always asking me if I wanted to buy things. If, say, a Richard Diebenkorn painting was two thousand dollars, they would sell it to me for a thousand dollars, but I didn’t have a thousand dollars. So, when I looked at photography, here I could be in a place where I could actually buy some art for myself. I could deal and work in a territory that was kind of uncharted, kind of cowboyland. That was very exciting. And I knew the context. I knew the history.

I was with Daniel Wolf and Howard Read, who is now the owner of Cheim Read Gallery. It was the three of us, and then Howard Read left to go to Robert Miller Gallery. So then it became Bonni and Daniel, until we expanded. The gallery closed in ’87 when Daniel finished gathering and building the photo department at the Getty Museum in California. To this day, that was the single largest and probably most important transaction in the history of photography dealing.

Would you like to tell us about that transaction?
Basically, the Getty Museum did not have a single photograph. Daniel knew the director of the museum, and suggested that they begin a photo department. They gave Daniel poetic license, essentially, to build the collection. So Daniel went around the world covertly buying the collections of André Jammes, Sam Wagstaff, Arnold Crane, and others.

About how many collections?
It was many major collections. Then Daniel closed the gallery because where would you go from there? And because he closed the gallery, I had to figure out what to do with myself.

Do you know what Daniel Wolf is doing today?
Yes, we’re very good friends. He’s still involved in photography a little bit. He’s got an amazing collection of nineteenth-century topographical albums, Carleton E. Watkins and American West material. He’s married to Maya Linn, the architect. He’s got two daughters. He lives in New York. He’s very active, with lots of interests that are businesses, really. He’s very entrepreneurial.

Were you ever part owner of the Daniel Wolf Gallery?
Never. But essentially I ran the gallery by myself, because Daniel was out doing all of this work for the Getty. I really learned a lot at Daniel Wolf, and of course we met everybody and had access to everything. Then in 1987 I had to figure out what to do, because I don’t have a trust fund and I didn’t have any money. I became a private dealer in a room that was 8x10 feet in the back of my husband’s office; however, I did have the clients and the artists, so it wasn’t as if I began with a blank tablet. I began with ten years of Daniel Wolf’s artists and ten years of dealing with clients.

Did Daniel Wolf allow you to continue selling his stock after he had left the gallery? So you had some inventory to begin with?
Yes, but Daniel and I had very different aesthetics, so the closing of the gallery actually was an opportunity for me to be my own person. Daniel’s aesthetic was very much based in the nineteenth-century. I’m pretty expert on nineteenth-century material, although it is not what I gravitate toward personally, and it was not what I wanted to show. We showed some contemporary work and I kept some of the artists: Todd Papageorge, Frank Gohlke, Eliot Porter, and others that I’m probably not remembering. Personally, I was always interested in mid-century, mostly American material, like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, and Robert Frank. Daniel was not focused on that, so this gave me an opportunity to concentrate on what I was most interested in. At the beginning of my private dealing in 1987, I represented some contemporary artists, but it was mostly mid-century material. Many, many Robert Franks; many, many, many Walker Evans. I know the Evans market really well and I was buying Evans when nobody wanted them, as well as Dorothea Lange, Weegee, and Lewis Hine (the National Child Labor Committee pictures).

Did you have an association with the National Child Labor Committee?
No, I bought a lot from different dealers and found them at auction and all kinds of places.

And how did you obtain the Walker Evans material?
I bought Walker Evans at auction for $200–400 dollars a print. Nobody was buying them. I just love the work. I have collected it personally, and I have also sold it. I’ve had a lot of Walker Evans in my lifetime, and some of the best ones that were ever on the market emanated from me. I set a record in the 1980s, late ’80s, for an Evans to a client who eventually donated the print to the Met.

Do you remember what the record was?
It was Penny Picture Displays, Birmingham, Alabama, 1936 — the photograph of all the little studio portraits, with the word “Studio” in the center — a vintage signed print. It sold for $58,000, which, I believe, was the highest price ever recorded for a Walker Evans, at the time. I’m actually not involved with the Evans market anymore because the people we sold these prints to are not people who are speculators. They’re serious people. These are cerebral pictures, they’re not decorative and they’re not about trend or “flipping.” Therefore I would suspect that 99% of what I’ve sold is still owned by the people I sold them to, or donated to an institution, which is great. I have seen maybe one or two Evans at auction that emanated from me. Really great prints are hard to find.

You said that when you started on your own, it was in a small space in your husband’s office. Did you leap straight from there to your present location at 57th Street?
No. The years 1987 and 1988 — like 2007 and 2008 — were boom times. You could sell pictures with your eyes closed. We were doing really well, and in 1993 I decided to move to a public space. I moved into a brownstone on 76th Street, between Park and Madison. It was a fantastic space, and we were there until six years ago. The reason we moved from there to here, was that my artists started working larger and larger and larger, and we didn’t have any space. We moved to 57th Street, versus Chelsea, and I’m very happy I made that decision.

Clearly, now you handle both sets of things: the traditional black-and-white and the large-scale contemporary color.
Small and large. Andreas Feininger, whose work I have handled since 1977, is an example of 8"x10" or 11"x14" black-and-white. Abe Morrell has worked in both black-and-white and color — he works in 20”x24”, still, but he also works in 50”x60” color. Large scale…I find that a bad category to be roped into. In my mind, I always reduce everything to the size of a page, 8"x10". If I still think it’s a good picture, then it doesn’t matter what size it is. So for me, bigger is not better, and…you know…what’s trendy doesn’t matter to me at all.

Why did you make the decision not to go to Chelsea?
It was really a personal decision. We looked in Chelsea, and at the time, in 2004, I could have gotten four times the amount of space for half the price of this space. I mean this is serious real estate here at the Fuller Building. Chelsea, Soho, Lower East Side — 57th Street is solid, and we are an uptown gallery dealing in mid-century material. We’re like Old Guard. I’m not a young, trendy person. It’s not my style. I’m not trying to be cool. And you know, on a personal note, it was like, O.K., it’s February, you’ve had an opening; you’re wearing high heels; it’s snowing; where do you want to be to get home? Chelsea or 57th Street? I’m very happy I made this decision. I really am. And I think we’ll be here for a while.

Did you find the transition to being your own dealer a really rocky experience?
No, it was shockingly smooth, because it was a boom time. Daniel wasn’t there at the Daniel Wolf Gallery very much because he was focusing on working with people in charge of extremely large-scale collections, like Richard Pare and Phyllis Lambert of the Seagram Collection. While Daniel was dealing with very large projects and collections, I was dealing with everything else. So I had long-term, tenured, established relationships with people that just segued straight to my gallery, without really much of a transition. I had Andreas Feininger, for example; I mean I had some serious artists. It wasn’t as if I was just starting, so it was fine.

In terms of your contemporary photographers, how do you obtain them?
When I left the Daniel Wolf Gallery, I was given the opportunity to choose my own aesthetic for contemporary work. So that was like, wow, I can represent whom I want and really build a stable, because in ’87 the competition was less than it is now. Contemporary painting galleries weren’t really showing photography in ’87. The photography world was still the only place within the art world where photographers wanted to show. I represented Laura McPhee and Virginia Beahan in 1989. They were working in color, and then Laura McPhee introduced me to her colleague Abelardo Morell in 1992. I think from Abe Morrell, the rest was history, really. I call this place “The House that Abe Built.” I think Abe Morrell is going to be in the history books a thousand years from now. He’s probably one of the most important artists working today. I based my stable on what I thought I would want to collect personally, and I still build it that way. There are a couple of exceptions. When I say a couple, I mean maybe two to four exceptions in this gallery now of artists that we represent for specific reasons, for certain needs, that I personally don’t want to own.

We’re very artist-centered. We work for the artist, much more so than we work for the client. That’s very different from a lot of dealers. I read an article about Marian Goodman of the Marian Goodman Gallery. She’s very much like that, and Irving Blum was like that and Leo Castelli was like that. The artist is the client to us. I know that an unnamed colleague of mine will not allow a phone call from an artist until after one o’clock in the afternoon; whereas, if I’m on the phone with a client and an artist calls, I get off the phone with the client. I feel very strongly that we’re only as good as what we show. You can have an amazing space and you can have lots of money and you can make beautiful frames, but it’s content that matters. It’s still what matters.

Would you like to say something about what motivates you to continue in the photography gallery business?
I do this because I love it. I’ve been ill, and I find that the gallery is a very healing thing.

I was diagnosed with lung cancer in February, 2010. Now I’m feeling really good and I’m in remission. Such a life-changing event makes you realize that instead of complaining and seeing the glass as half-empty, and feeling stressed and wanting more, more, more, it’s a good idea to stop and take an inventory of what you’ve done. I realize that this is a really great gallery, that I’ve worked very hard to make it such, and that I have a lot of gratitude for that.

I think that when one has a passion for something, he or she is very lucky. I’ve had a good, successful run as a gallerist because I am informed by my passion for the medium and for the artists. I feel really filled with gratitude that this is what I do and will continue to do, and that I’ve been successful with it. I sometimes don’t think about that, but we have really fostered and nurtured and presented a lot of people who have really gone on to have fantastic careers. I’m very proud of that.

Do you have a day set aside in which you look at portfolios of photographers?
Yes, on the first Thursday of every month, people drop off their work. It can take me ten seconds to determine whether it’s good or not. I can’t meet with people. If I did that, I wouldn’t be able to do my own work. There are an inordinate number of artists out there who don’t have representation. It’s very sad to me, but the ratio of who will succeed and be in a gallery versus who wants to be is really skewed. It’s not easy being an artist or a musician or an actor or a writer. My relationship with my artists is very collaborative and they’re very happy.

Do most of your contemporary artists do editions?
Yes. Off the top of my head, I would say 95%.

If someone doesn’t want to do editioning, do you try to persuade that person?
No. I never tell an artist what to do. In fact, I have one artist who keeps asking me what to do, and I find that annoying.

In terms of contemporary color photographers…
Why do you keep saying color photographers?

So many people feel that’s where it’s at, at present.
Well, it’s my liberal Jewish upbringing. I don’t differentiate between a gay, black, or white person. I don’t use the term color photography and I don’t ever judge anything based on whether it’s color or not. It has no relevance to me as to whether I like something or not. So, we happen to have a bunch of people that work in color, and a bunch of people that don’t. I don’t view adding color as something I am actively pursuing. I would never think in those terms. I would think only of adding great art, great work.

Do you find that most of your clients are as embracing of black-and-white as of color?
Yes. We have many clients who want many different things, but we have a tremendous number who like what I like…both mid-century material and contemporary. They cross the boundaries and have color work, black-and-white work, Evans and Morells and Feiningers and Vitalis.

What is the general price range of your color?
The least expensive Ron van Dongen color flowers start at sixteen hundred dollars. We have a lot of pictures that are five thousand dollars and under in this gallery. Historically, we’ve been known as very fair-priced. You can always raise prices, but you can’t lower them. Abe Morell’s prices have been raised only a few times in twenty years, very systematically and very fairly. I still think his prices are low, relative to who he is. I think Massimo Vitali’s prices are low, relative to who he is. We’d rather be fair and proletariat about it. I’ve watched people’s artists at auctions sell for one-fifth the price of what the client paid for it, and we don’t want to do that.

About how many contemporary photographers do you have at present?
I don’t really know, but some of the main artists include Abelardo Morell, Massimo Vitali, Simon Norfolk, Matthew Pillsbury, Rena Bass Forman, Karine Laval, Paolo Pellegrin, and Laura McPhee. We also have fashion, like Georges Dambier, and new talent like Jehad Nga and Cedric Delsaux.

Would you say that most of your business now is contemporary photography? Versus the mid-century, or other?
I don’t know how people perceive us: do they think of us as a contemporary gallery or both? Laurence Miller does both; Edwynn Houk does both; Pace/MacGill does both; not that many people do both older material and contemporary. I hope that’s the way people think of us. We still deal with clients who have been collecting mid-century and earlier material for twenty-five years. We represent Louis Stettner, for example. He’s very primary to our stable. We’ve been working with Andreas Feininger material since 1977. We deal a lot in both Stettner and Feininger. However, to answer your question, most of what we sell is contemporary.

You referred to your gallery as the “House that Abe built.” Could you tell us a little about why you regard Abelardo Morell as so important in the history of photography? That question would involve some explanation of his special techniques, like the camera obscura and the tent photography.
I’ve been working with Abe since 1992. He has produced at least six or eight completed bodies of work, each of which develops a different idea. For me, after all these years, I still find it difficult to think of any other photographer who has progressed successfully as an artist with so many ideas, each of which is different from the others, but all of which collate as the aesthetic of an Abe Morell. Therefore the picture of a book or the picture of a tent camera in the baptistery in Florence, in color or black-and-white, all of the aesthetic value is consistent. That is a remarkable, remarkable feat, if you think about it. There really aren’t that many people who have accomplished that. There are many, many people who have done incredible work, but they haven’t been able to switch up the style or have different ideas and to integrate them so seamlessly and so perfectly. It’s kind of the opposite extreme of the trend-driven one-trick pony. He’s a little like the Beatles, you know…he’s everlasting. Five hundred years from now someone will be looking at Abe’s work and think it’s timeless and extraordinary. The thing that’s most interesting to me about it is that none of it is manipulated.

How many decades has he been working?
Well, he’s sixty-two years old. He’s a Cuban immigrant who fled under duress from Havana to New York at age fourteen. He was inspired by all of the street photographers who were working in the 60s and early 70s, and he worked in that style for a while. You can see this in his books. He went to Bowdoin College, and then he went to Yale graduate school. He got married young and had a child in 1984 or 1985; his world switched up, as everybody’s does when they have a family. He was home and experiencing interior space, and he started looking at things like a baby bottle or a wine glass. I think his aesthetic began during that period when he was at home. His first picture book was in 1987, a children’s book, and from that he became his own eyes, and he was off and running.

The great curator, John Szarkowski of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, once commented that most photographers are at their peak for only a decade.
Exactly, that’s absolutely correct. You know, I’ve been selling photographs for 35 years. Sometimes they don’t get even ten years. Abe is on his thirtieth year, and he’s not even close to his peak. This is extraordinary. Others who have remained solid throughout time would be the photographers Lee Friedlander, Emmet Gowin, Sally Mann, Vik Muniz, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Robert Frank. I am sure there are others that I am not mentioning, but this is an elite group.

Please tell us what you mean by “tent photography.”
The tent photographs are an offshoot of Abe’s work with the camera obscura, which he started in the early 90s. [The camera obscura is a box-shaped optical device that projects an image of its surroundings upside-down on a screen or a wall.] He’s pushing the limits of what the camera obscura can do. He created an aerodynamic tent, inside of which he projects images. The tent pictures are a perfect example of how he pushes the limits, because he’s come up with the idea that he can make a picture like a camera obscura onto the ground, with periscopes and all kinds of equipment; however, none of it is ever manipulated. It’s brilliant.

So a lot of what he is doing has to do with optical illusion.
Very much so. He’s all about optical illusion. His work is all about how his mind can create, versus what I think is really boring — all of that computer manipulation that so many people are doing.

That raises an interesting topic because much of contemporary large-scale color photography involves computer manipulation. There are many who feel that that’s just great; and equally there are many who feel that’s not the way to do photography, that it interferes with reality and creates the impression that photography cannot be “believed.”
I get what you’re saying. You know, when I read Howard Greenberg’s interview in Focus Magazine [February, 2011], I agreed with Howard. I, too, am an old-guard photography dealer who respects the context and the history of the medium and knows it well. Yes, there are incredible images being made with computer manipulation and all kinds of digital this and that. I even own some of this material and think some of these artists are incredible, but I am, like Howard, a classical dealer, even with my contemporary stable. The artists here, all of them, are using film. They’re all brilliant technicians in the medium. None of them really manipulates. They’re manipulating through their minds, not through the darkroom, or whatever it’s called now.

You know, I still read newspapers and books. It could be an age thing. I’m almost 58 years old. I prefer something that is real; that probably has a lot to do with my love of older material, and the material also that we are very involved with. So the work of the contemporary people in my gallery is not based on trends or money. It is based on a cerebral, thoughtful, respectful attitude toward the continuation of the history of photography.

Could we discuss another photographer on your roster, Massimo Vitali?
Yes, Massimo Vitali is antithetical to Abelardo Morell in a way, but at the same time he’s a very primary artist to the gallery. He works in large-scale color. I was seduced by his work because he’s taking a slice of how people live their lives. He’s taking a slice of how we separate our leisure time, and what we have to do to accommodate it. That might not look that challenging at first, but the works actually are extremely cerebral, in that they’re really a comment, a kind of documentary, on how we have to divide and conquer our non-working, non-productive world. I have enormous respect for how he’s able to do that, and I do think his photographs are really beautiful. His color palette is like Impressionism. He’s Italian and he’s older than Abe Morell and he has a unique style.

The next person in my stable who continues to amaze me is Simon Norfolk. He just showed me a new body of work that we’ll be showing in the fall, done in Afghanistan. It practically made me cry, it was so good. He went back to John Burke, who’s a little-known nineteenth-century photographer who worked in Afghanistan in the 1880s. There are only a few copies of Burke’s works in the world. There are some at Brown University. Also, one’s at the Getty, one’s at the Victoria and Albert, and one’s in private hands. Norfolk retraced Burke’s steps in Afghanistan ten years after he — Simon Norfolk — was in Afghanistan. He made a brilliant body of work there, and he’s added a component of portraits, group portraits, that are new. He continues to have new ideas and they’re amazing ideas. It’s fantastic for me to be interested continually by my artists who show me work that I am really interested in, because that keeps me well.

Is Simon Norfolk American or British?
He’s British, and he’s brilliant. And we’re very excited about this. He’s going to have a show at the Tate Modern in London in May of this year. We’re going to be showing it in September-October, which will be the ten-year anniversary of our involvement in Afghanistan and the ten-year anniversary of Sept. 11th. It’s a very controversial, serious body of work, but at the same time his work looks like old master paintings. He has an amazing ability to switch up what you see; it’s not what you see. The same way as Morell and Vitali, in different formats. What you’re looking at is not really the whole story of what you’re seeing. Therefore it’s not just decorative; it’s really a lot of thought and intellect involved in how they’re making you see what you see. This relates to my interest in photographers like Lewis Hine, who did the child labor pictures. I’m not interested in pretty pictures — they have to have something to say. I’m not really interested in Steichen’s flower pictures; I’m not really interested in Pictorialism at all.

You had mentioned Matthew Pillsbury as being central to the stable.
Yes, Matthew Pillsbury is a young artist in his thirties who has done an amazing body of work, who’s growing, and who is a younger statesman. Abe and Massimo are senior statesmen. They’re fully formed artists in their sixties. Matthew Pillsbury is in his thirties, and his work is incredible. He’s got a fantastic career and it’s lasted a while already; it’s been seven or eight years. So we know he’s in for the long haul. I call them my MVPs — Morell, Vitali, Pillsbury.

Whom else do you represent?
We represent Paolo Pellegrin, the great, gold-standard Magnum photojournalist. He is, in my opinion, one of the most brilliant photojournalists working today. He has a very successful career on that side. He’s on contract to Newsweek; he just did all the pictures in Cairo for Newsweek. He’s done a lot of work for the New York Times. However, in the sphere of the fine-art market, people aren’t really interested in a contemporary photojournalism that is “rough.” So I look at Paolo as someone who is extraordinarily important, who’s aesthetically brilliant, but who is not somebody who’s about marketing or money. I will offer him as someone I believe in, and we will continue to represent him forever and ever. I would put money on it that a hundred years from now he’s going to be considered the Dorothea Lange of his day, for sure.

Would you like to discuss the French fashion photographer Georges Dambier, and the American photographers Louis Stettner and Bill Ray, all of whom you represent?
Yes, we’re very excited. Our next show is Georges Dambier, whom we discovered about five years ago. He’s 97 years old. He lives in Provence. He was a very important fashion photographer in the fifties for Elle Magazine in France. He photographed the supermodels of the times, Suzy Parker, Dorian Leigh, etc. He’s an undiscovered master that we’re thrilled to be presenting. That’s always really fun for a dealer. We did a show 15 years ago of previously undiscovered pictures of strippers by Garry Winogrand. And Dambier appearing right now…it’s my pleasure to do that for somebody while he’s still alive. I always love that an artist can see success within his or her lifetime.

We also presented Louis Stettner, one of my favorite artists and people. He did a body of work in 1958 of Pennsylvania Station that had never been seen. It was an amazing exhibition and it was so nice to show it to the world, and now every museum that I can think of owns the work. His career really was reinvented from that.

We are very happy to represent Bill Ray, formerly a staff photographer for Life Magazine, who went around the world photographing important events and interesting people. In addition to Life, his work has appeared in many other publications, including Fortune and Newsweek. His photographs have appeared frequently on the covers of Newsweek.

Laura McPhee?
I have an incredible affinity for Laura, who was the first color photographer that I represented along with Virginia Beahan in 1989, the year that they got a Guggenheim. Laura continues to make amazing bodies of work that are very quiet, very under the radar, but very acclaimed and successful within certain spheres, like the institutional sphere. She’s sort of a quiet, unknown-well known artist. One of the best things she ever did for me was to ask me to meet her colleague Abelardo Morell, so I have a special spot for Laura.

How have you found the recession in relation to the photography marketplace?
Well, the recession started in 2008, when Lehman Brothers crashed in September. Our business went down, but our business was so insanely up, that going down still meant that we were profitable, which is quite lucky from what I hear. So we’ve never really had an unprofitable year. It’s kind of like the Energizer Bunny. People flock to us even more at some points because of the fairness of the price relative to the credentials of the work.

Do you go to a lot of art fairs?
We’ve done Paris Photo for fourteen years in a row. We’ve done AIPAD. We’ve done the Armory. We did DuBai one year. Historically we haven’t done many art fairs because I had two small children and I didn’t want to leave them a lot, and, as one of my colleagues from out of town said to me, New York is an art fair. This street — 57th Street — is a constant art fair. Essentially, if you are a serious collector of any medium, you’re going to come to New York at least once or twice a year. So, therefore, if we stay here, we’re going to be seeing a lot of people. For some galleries, perhaps a gallery in Austria, art fairs are their whole business. Many galleries are dependent on their income from art fairs. We are not.

So you regard New York as still being the center of the art world?
Well, for photography, yes. There might be lots of interesting things going on in Berlin, lots of interesting things going on in Hong Kong, but the people who are buying art, buying photography, pass through here. I think that London probably has a larger share of Asian and Russian oligarchs passing through than America does, but there are enough people who come to New York. And we deal with people all over the world now because of the internet and because of people who come here and people we meet in Paris. You know we have a really broad, world-wide clientele, which, I would say, is much more expansive than it was ten years ago.

You went to the Dubai Art Fair? How did you find the whole idea of collecting photography there? Were you educating people from scratch?
Pretty much. I mean, we went the second year that it took place in Dubai, so it’s five or six years ago already. And we were kind of amazed. We tailored it to Muslim code and we didn’t bring anything that was nude or disturbing. We wound up selling a lot of work out of books to people, work we didn’t think would be appropriate to put on the wall, which is very interesting.

What is your perception of Paris Photo over the years? Has it changed?
I think it’s the gold standard of photography shows, and if you’re a photography collector, it’s a must. I like to be in the context of a photography fair, versus a multi-media fair. I’m just more comfortable. I think Paris Photo has a kind of cerebral crowd that knows what they’re looking at. It’s a great way for us to see what’s going on around the world, because it’s so international. There are only ten American galleries in the show. So for us it’s a great education. We find things there. We meet people there. We see galleries we never heard of, or we get to see artists we’ve never seen.

Does the internet play much of a role in gathering new clients?
Yes. We have sold a fair amount of material to people online. JPEGs make it really easy for follow-up. Yes, it’s good. You can be much more active and responsive much more quickly with the internet. People find us, our website. Sometimes we pull up who’s looked at our website and it’s people from all over the world, every country you can imagine. Therefore it’s exposing us, the gallery, to a much, much wider audience. However, we’re not really that involved in the whole social network thing, the way other galleries might be, things like Facebook and Twitter, at this time.

Are there pockets in photography that you think are under-appreciated by collectors?
Yes, I think that Lewis Hine is under-appreciated — his child labor pictures. I think that price-wise they’re shockingly low. There’s a lot of mid-century material that’s underrated. Elliot Erwitt is underrated. I think some people, many people, are inflated. That’s where the word “trend” comes in. There’s been a lot of trendy artists who have commanded extraordinary prices and then five years later their work is up at auction at a low reserve and it’s not selling. I watch that very closely because I love art and commerce and that’s where you see that “trend” comes in.

I always say that if you take all the Whitney Biennial catalogues and you pick a year five years back, you will see that a tremendous number of those artists are obscure. I have worked to be the opposite of that. I don’t want to represent an artist who is trendy and will be gone. I want to further a career and yes, of course, I’ve represented people who were popular for a while, but I don’t represent them any more. You know, one of the great examples to me is Merry Alpern’s Dirty Windows pictures. I still think to this day they’re brilliant. They’re at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art right now, and there are eighteen prints. The pictures sold for five and eight hundred dollars. They didn’t sell for fifty and eighty thousand dollars. And they’re still selling. It’s an example of something that has stood the test of time even though it’s only one body of work. And we haven’t capitalized and made the prices crazy. Therefore we’re still selling the work and people have bought sets of it, the whole set, because of it.

Were you yourself ever a painter or photographer, or do you think of yourself as primarily a business person?
No. I was not a painter or photographer. I was an art historian. It would have been nice if there had been such a thing as the “business of art” courses when I went to college, because I had to learn about business on the job. I always say, “I’m not a business person, I’m an art dealer, and they are two very different things.” At New York University they now have the classes on art and commerce and administration that didn’t exist when I was in college. The idea of net and gross, or percentage, or commission — none of that was ever spoken about. I had to learn all that by rote, by default, with mistakes along the way. To this day, I don’t think of myself as a great business person.

What do you do with large-scale works and boxes of smaller works that can’t be accommodated at the gallery?
We pay enormous sums of money for climate-controlled, off-site art storage, as does Howard Greenberg, as does Pace/MacGill. I always say, what we’re paying for off-site storage is a two-bedroom apartment in Indiana. You know, we pay tremendous amounts of money storing all this material. These places are so together and climate-controlled, so dust-free and cognizant of archival matters, that we don’t have to worry about it. I mean, we have amazing off-site storage. And my personal collection is mostly in off-site storage or here. My house has only ten percent of my collection; only five percent is on the walls.

When you are educating a new collector, do you still get a lot of questions about how many prints exist of a photograph?
Yes, we still have to deal with that. We also have people who say to me, “What’s this going to be worth in five years?” And my answer is always the same: “I don’t have a crystal ball, and if that’s why you’re buying, perhaps you should consider not buying this.” And, yes, I have lots of different ways of explaining it depending on the person, as to why editions are not necessarily important. There are lots of reasons, lots of ways to explain to somebody why something is not editioned or not signed or whatever. It’s brain surgery in a way, photography, because each artist has his own scenario. Contemporary is easy. It’s usually editioned, numbered, signed. But anything that’s not contemporary, each artist has his own individual scenario. You have to be able to trust the people you’re buying work from.

How would you describe the kind of client who is most likely to be a good client for you? Is there any profile?
No. Every kind of person. We have a vast and deep clientele, a very loyal and deep clientele. We have people who buy pictures from us without asking us the name of the artist. That’s based on their trust and in the fact that I think it’s a good picture. That may sound arrogant, but that has happened more than once.

Do you find that European clients differ from American clients?
I don’t find any difference.

Do you think it’s possible for someone to start a photography gallery from scratch, right now?
If they have good vision. Lots of people have started galleries because they have all the financial backing in the world, but they have to have good vision. Also, it’s very political. People succeed for different reasons, and things become very well known for different reasons, not necessarily because the work is great. You know, it’s the real world. Things get reviewed for certain reasons and things don’t get reviewed for certain reasons. Attention gets paid to some things and attention doesn’t get paid to things that should have attention paid to them. And, so, could you start a gallery? There are many factors involved in that answer. You can’t necessarily start a gallery with just fantastic vision. You need more tenacity in this world now than when I began. There’s much more competition now.

During the 1970s, the original Witkin Gallery in New York had the world at its feet in terms of selection of photographers and estates.
Exactly. It’s a different world now. I call it the shark pool. It’s really competitive. It’s very much about money. Very much about who knows whom. You know, it’s much less about the art than it used to be. However, I think that at our gallery we have remained true to ourselves and we’re done well because of that. And I watch people not be true to themselves. I watch galleries have the “show de jour” and then two years later, where’s that artist? The art world is unregulated; it’s a handshake; it’s totally secretive; and no one has any benchmarks as to how they’re doing versus someone else. There’s nothing published, really. We have no idea how we’re doing relative to another gallery. We can know only how we’re doing relative to ourselves. But I know that my artists are very happy, and my gallery is doing well for me.

In a sea of art galleries in general, and of photography galleries in particular, what makes your gallery stand out?
I think that we have good artists, a legacy, and experience. We’re pioneers. My experience as a photography dealer started in 1977. We have a complete, fulfilled context of the medium and the market, encompassing work from the 1850s to the present. We can contextualize what we’re doing and realize whether something contemporary is a new idea or a re-hashed idea from something earlier. There are many people who are doing re-hashed Egglestons, Friedlanders, etc. I can separate the ideas within the context of the history. We have a really good reputation for being honest and truthful and loyal; we take care of people and we’re not exclusive. You know, when the market crashed and all these arrogant dealers who have twelve-year-olds at the desk who can’t hand you a price list realized that maybe they should be friendlier, we didn’t have to change the way that we were. We’ve always been inclusive. I think that photography is a democratic medium and we’ve always behaved that way.

This interview was published in Focus Magazine’s 23rd issue, Spring 2012. After a courageous 2 and a half year battle with cancer, Bonni passed away in December 2012. For more information on the Benrubi Gallery, please visit benrubigallery.com.

Originally published at Focus Fine Art Photography Magazine.