Howard Greenberg

In 2007, Howard Greenberg celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of his gallery. From his first days “hunting and gathering” photographs in Woodstock, New York, during the 1970s, to his transition into a major New York City gallery owner, beginning in the 1980s, he has approached his business with a passion and sense of commitment that have enabled him to be acknowledged as one of the major presences in the medium. He has built his gallery on his own taste for classic photography, exhibiting both vintage work and the work of traditionalist, living photographers. For many years he eschewed a major trend in the marketplace toward large-scale contemporary color work, but in his 2012 “update” at the end of this interview, he describes his new, second gallery, which is devoted to contemporary photography. Uniquely qualified to give a perspective on the fine-art photography marketplace, Howard Greenberg offers the readers of Focus Magazine his thoughts on photography’s present and future. It is important to note the timing of the original interview: fall of 2008, as the recession was taking a strong hold on the economy of the United States.

What are your thoughts on the fine-art photography market in relation to the recession?
I’ve been through a few recessions before. We all agree this one’s different from the others, but, nonetheless, it’s a cycle. Perhaps we’re going to go lower than we’ve gone before. It may take a longer time for the economy to rev up again, but, nonetheless, it’s still another cycle. What I’ve always discovered, and now feel that I can rely on, is that the photography market simply flattens out, which means, the very best pictures continue to sell. Maybe they don’t make new record prices — but they continue to sell well. For the not-very-best pictures or the more common ones, it’s tough going. Either they sell for lower prices at auction or, if the gallery owners keep the prices up, they sit in boxes. And more or less it will be that way for a while. It doesn’t scare me because we’ve all survived through those times, and I think we’ll survive fine again. Indeed there is business. It’s not like things have come to a halt. It’s harder to find, and more people are not buying at the moment, but there’s still business to be had. We’re still making sales and deals in the gallery.

What would be a good strategy to suggest to collectors during the recession?
The ideal for the market right now is that enough people of means who like to collect photography see the wisdom in putting those cash dollars into photographs, hard objects if you will, as opposed to the stock market or other kinds of investments, which, as we know, are unpredictable at best. There will be a time when the stock market looks solid, because it will start to make its way up, but that could be a while. One of the reasons that I, personally, feel reasonably secure right now, and I’ve spoken to other people who say the same thing, is that I have many great photographs in my personal collection. While I may not be able to sell any on the spot tomorrow, I feel one-hundred percent rock solid that these are great examples of the medium, and they will always be desirable, and they will always be saleable. So it’s a good time for collectors to buy. As I see from past experience, a certain percentage of prior collectors will do that. I can only hope that a lot of the people will see the wisdom in buying now, often at prices that are low and in areas where you know prices will have a good future, but, more importantly, at a time to get good pictures.

Edward Steichen, Gloria Swanson, New York, 1924, Permission of Joanna T. Steichen; Courtesy The Howard Greenberg Gallery.

In the case of living photographers represented by a gallery, is it ever wise for the gallery to reduce its retail prices during time of recession?
Well, you don’t want to undermine your own market, you know. If you’re the primary representative of a photographer, and you’ve established prices at a certain level, you really don’t want to change that price level on the low side. I don’t think it’s wise. I also don’t think it’s very ethical. It undermines those people who paid the high prices. Of course, some galleries will perhaps ramp up the discounts. Where they might have held to ten percent as a maximum discount, they may now give a client fifteen percent, or if they’re buying a few pictures, twenty percent. The idea is to keep the market moving along by giving a slightly better price to current buyers, without undermining the price level.

Secondary markets, like the auction market, are a completely different story. I’m not in the habit of bad-mouthing auctions, but I must say something about them. We’re competitive — galleries and auctions — for many reasons, but auctions also work hand in hand with galleries in the market. One thing I was painfully aware of this fall [2008] was a buyer’s premium of up to twenty-five percent on works for which the hammer price was under $50,000. Every time I was inclined to buy a picture at (hopefully) the first bid that met the reserve price, nine out of ten times, I thought to myself, Don’t bother, because when I added the twenty-five percent commission, I would still be paying too much for that picture. I really feel it’s been a terrible time for them to raise it; twenty percent was bad enough.

So if pictures weren’t selling at auction, and the buyer’s premium was a primary reason for it, then that twenty-five percent commission alone is really hurting the market. When you compare that to what goes on in a gallery, the difference you pay in price for a picture is astounding. I’ll give you a fictitious example. If “X” picture were to sell for $5,000 at an auction, you’re paying $6,250. If that same picture were in the gallery, the gallerist could easily be asking $7,000 and maybe even $7,500, and with a discount, the buyer would probably be paying the same $6,200 for it. Now, the buyer thinks he’s paying $5,000 for the picture when he raises his hand at auction. He comes to the gallery, he thinks the price is $7,500. That’s an enormous spread. It makes the gallery price look much higher than the auction house, but in reality, it’s the same price. I think people should be very aware of that in contemplating how to buy, and what prices really mean right now in the photography world.

Louis Faurer, Broadway Convertible, New York, c. 1949. Copyright © Louis Faurer Estate; Courtesy The Howard Greenberg Gallery.

At the time of this interview (fall, 2008), your gallery has a show of Minor White (1908–1998) photographs on the wall. It has been a long time since Minor White has been exhibited in New York. Why do you think that is?
I think that other curators have the perception that the Minor White exhibition curated by Peter Bunnell at the Museum of Modern Art in 1989 is hard to go up against. I think that, psychologically, it has kept the curators away from Minor White as a project. However, I found that Peter was extremely encouraging to Nathan Lyons, who curated the show and wrote a text for the book, and to me, about the show.

Did the show affect the market for Minor White photographs?
From a business point of view, this was a perfect show to do, because Minor White’s prints are terribly undervalued in the market. Everybody knows it’s been this way for several years, even though the prices have recently started to creep up. One even sold for a hammer price of $28,000 at auction. I know, because I bought it. It’s on the wall. I could buy Minor Whites for the going price in the market during these last couple years, hold them, knowing that as long as I had a good critical mass and I did it correctly, I could change the price level, and it would be acceptable. I didn’t go crazy, I didn’t push them too far. The prices have been three, four, to seven to eight thousand; now on the wall they are from eight to eighteen thousand, for most of them. There are some exceptions that are higher. I think that’s a realistic price rise, and I think the market is accepting it, because I’ve sold quite a few. All that sort of fell into place. I was able to invest and to wait, because of the level I was buying at. I won’t make a fortune, but it will be a successful little business enterprise. That’s nice, when it all adds up that way, but it’s also rare to be able to do that, I have to say. In most cases these days, you can’t. If I wanted to put together a good Edward Weston show or a Paul Strand show, forget it. I mean, I would have to borrow pictures, take them on consignment, catch as catch can. You know, it’s almost impossible.

Do you think there are just too many photography dealers now?
I’ve said for a long, long time that the blessing and the curse of photography is that there are so many photographs. It’s good because there could be a photograph or two or three in every home. But the difficult question is, what does that mean in terms of value and saturation? We’ve created a monster. You know, during the first and second wave of photo dealers, of photo believers in photography, we hoped that the medium would be successful in terms of being considered valuable and being put on equal footing with other mediums, but it’s gone beyond the proportions of what we were thinking about. Now that photography as a medium has become so overgrown and so used by everyone from all walks of life — particularly from the art school or the commercial world, as fashion and celebrity and so much else has filtered into the world of marketing of art and photography — it’s all grist for the mill. What’s happened is an explosion, and galleries have opened all over the place to accommodate an enormous potential of growth and diversity of the market. So I don’t know. . . it was fun in the early days when we all knew one another, and it was collegial, and it was as if we were in a rather small universe with a common agreement. Now it’s all changed. It seems I don’t know ninety percent of the people who show photographs, whether they’re art galleries or photography dealers.

There are about 118 members of the Association of International Photography Art Dealers (AIPAD).
But how many hundreds of dealers who show photographs are not members of AIPAD and could care less, for that matter? And the real big difference is that the art galleries don’t consider themselves photography galleries, but they do show photographs. There are hundreds and hundreds of those all over the world, and AIPAD doesn’t mean anything to them.

Paul Strand, Lusetti Family, Luzzara, Italy, 1953. Copyright ©Aperture Foundation, Inc., Paul Strand Archive; Courtesy The Howard Greenberg Gallery.

There’s a tremendous emphasis now on the large-scale, contemporary, color photograph in tiny editions, like three, five, and ten. It’s a different universe from the 1970s photography art gallery scene. Do you sometimes show large-scale, color photographs?
No, and I’m a bit of an anachronism. I’ve been able to carve out a place for myself in what I call classic photography, and that’s often vintage and often small in size. It also happens to be black-and-white often, although I have nothing against color, and I do sell some color photography.

My story, or part of it anyway, is that seven or eight years ago, when the handwriting was on the wall that I had to leave Soho — rents had gone up, more than doubled for me — I had a big decision to make. All the galleries were leaving for Chelsea, for the most part. I was painfully aware that the place to be in the art world was contemporary. I had to decide whether I wanted to become a contemporary gallery. Or did I want to become a gallery that is half vintage and half contemporary? Or did I want to remain a slightly old and “classic” photo gallery? It was a tough decision for me to make. In the end, I decided to stick to what I had always done and to move to 57th Street, not to Chelsea, as a statement thereof. And I’m lucky, because there certainly has been enough activity in this world, my world, to continue to allow the business to thrive. It’s only gotten better. And also as more and more people have gone into contemporary, I’ve become more and more of a specialist in classic photography, which is just fine. It doesn’t make it any easier, but it makes it less competitive in a certain way. And in this world of enormous competition in photography in general, it’s nice to have a little corner that I feel comfortable with, where I can be successful. You know, it turned out to be a good decision for me, for those reasons and also primarily because this is the only kind of photography I really know about, or care about that much. I’m just not a contemporary person.

Of course, vintage work has taken off financially and the contemporary, large-scale, color work has become very expensive, but then there’s that in-between thing of, let’s say, 1970s prints from 1920s and ’30s negatives, modern prints by old masters like Imogen Cunningham (1883–1976) and André Kertész (1894–1985). The price level of these modern prints has just sort of sat there.
Well, I think the shakeout with that sort of picture has been more of an image shakeout. People still buy the best pictures that are later, signed prints by Kertész, Cunningham, and others, with great regularity. You know, if I had twenty 1971 prints of Cunningham’s Magnolia Blossom, 1925, I could sell them inside two months for a lot of money. The Magnolia Blossom, a good 1970s print in good condition, is about $15,000. If I had ten 1970s prints of Kertész’s Chez Mondrian, Paris, 1926 — Chez Mondrian is a little tougher to sell because there are hundreds of them — I could still sell it over and over. But when you get to the second tier, the slightly less desirable images, that’s when it’s tougher going. It’s usually newer collectors who buy the later prints of the masters. That’s because, with such a smorgasbord of pictures they can buy, they’ll gravitate toward the greatest hits. It’s not so much because they’re famous, but usually, because they’re just great pictures. All the rest tend to go by the wayside, and you can see this at auction, also. André Kertész is a good example. Several of his pictures will still sell at auction, but they’re mired in the two- or three-thousand-dollar range, and then you’ll get one of the better ones and it will sell for seven, eight, nine thousand dollars.

Let’s talk about your background. This would be the saga of how you became a photography dealer.
I grew up in Brooklyn. A few years after I graduated from college [State University of New York, Buffalo], I moved to Woodstock, New York, in 1972. I was a very young photographer. I had just purchased my first camera about two years before I moved there. I didn’t go to college in order to be a photographer; I started making pictures after college. In Woodstock, two things happened: I became the Woodstock Times photographer, which was great. The Woodstock Times had been publishing for four months at that point. It’s still alive. Also, I was part of the formation of a group of photographers and artists. We called ourselves the Artists’ Coop. I think there were nine or ten of us in the beginning. We rented a barn just outside of town to use as a gallery and meeting place, and forum for lectures and whatnot. Four years later, another photographer, Michael Feinberg — formerly a student of Minor White — and I founded a place called the Catskill Center for Photography. Michael later moved to Hawaii, where he has been for a long time now.

The Center, which is now called CPW, or Center for Photography at Woodstock, has become a significant organization. It was always a nonprofit that exhibited photographs year-round and published a quarterly, which it still publishes. During the second year of the Center, we started to do summer workshops. It’s a great program that has continued to this day. It has become a vehicle for emerging young photographers, a place to show, a place to gather, and so on. That’s probably its most important function. We also had a darkroom, and there was a school. I modeled the Center after a few of the nonprofits that I had seen and known about, from Friends of Photography in Carmel, California, to Light Work up in Syracuse, New York, and SF Camerawork in San Francisco, California. I thought in the beginning that the Center would be a nice complement to the Apeiron Workshops in Millerton, New York. Millerton used to be the home of Aperture. I thought that because the Center was more of a daytime activity and the workshops in Millerton were a weeklong activity, together they would make it more interesting for photography in the Hudson Valley.

I ran the Center for a few years. I was never able to take any salary. I was getting more and more interested in the history of photography, so at a certain point I stepped down as director, maybe in 1980. I was trying to figure out the next step for myself . Colleen Kenyon eventually took over running the Center and did so for about twenty years. Soon after I left the Center, I opened my own little commercial gallery, my first gallery, called Photofind. It was around the corner from the Center in a great little building that was, at first, an empty shell. I created a gallery out of it, and I was off and running as a photography dealer. It was about 1981 when I started Photofind with a partner who was an art and antique dealer. The partnership lasted only a year, but I had five nice years in Woodstock growing it one way or another. Then I moved to the Soho district of New York City in 1986.

Leon Levinstein, Untitled, n.d.; Courtesy The Howard Greenberg Gallery.

Could you tell us about some of the people you met in Woodstock?
I met many interesting people in Woodstock over the years, and I still do. Woodstock was home to the second oldest art colony in the country. It was founded in 1902. The original art colony was called Byrdcliffe. There have been recent large exhibitions about the Byrdcliffe Art Colony that have traveled around the world. It was a utopian socialist community founded by a British guy named Ralph Radcliffe Whitehead and his wife, Jane Byrd McCall. She was from Philadelphia. Anyway, it has had this great tradition of creative people in a rather free atmosphere, an open atmosphere. So I landed in Woodstock in the middle of all this wonderful history. The people who were directly connected to the history, a lot of the painters who thrived there in the ’30s and ’40s, were still there, or their sons and daughters were still there. Great contemporary painters like Philip Guston and Al Held were living there. There were also great writers. Philip Roth was there. There were so many wonderfully creative, interesting people. I landed in the middle of this nest. I was taken by it. I loved it.

I got to know Doris Lee, a painter and the first wife of FSA photographer Russell Lee (1903–1986). They split up in 1938. Once or twice I asked her if she had any of Russell Lee’s photographs and she said, “Don’t bother asking me about Russell Lee. I don’t have anything.” That was the end of it. Then Doris passed away. A year later I got a call from a local antique dealer who said they had found a couple cartons of photographs under the daybed in her studio. The daybed was covered with fabric and you couldn’t see underneath. It turned out there were five hundred Russell Lee prints in the cartons underneath. There were also Dorothea Lange photographs and other things. I was able to buy the entire contents for $5,000, and it was one of those great early finds.

Along the Woodstock path, I met Joan Munkácsi, the daughter of Hungarian photographer Martin Munkácsi. That was in 1982 or 1983. Joan was a book editor in New York before she moved to Woodstock, so we could work together not only on my representation of her father’s work, but also on my earliest catalogues. We became friends and colleagues.

I came to know Sy Kattelson because he owned the movie theater in town. We were friendly, but I had no idea whatsoever that he was a photographer. One day I was in the local frame shop, the Woodstock Framing Gallery, run by another friend named Alice Somerstein. She had a bunch of vintage prints there, New York street pictures circa 1950, sitting around. I saw them and they were good, and I said, “What the heck is that, Alice?” And she said, “Oh, those are Sy Kattelson’s photographs.” And I said “Sy Kattelson?” And she said, “Yeah, he used to be a photographer.” I said, “I had no idea,” and I looked at them, and they were fantastic. So I spoke with Sy and I found out that he had been a member of the Photo League, and Sid Grossman was one of his teachers.

Sy immediately got me interested in the Photo League. I did a little research. I found out about Anne Tucker [curator, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and author] and her work on the Photo League. One thing led to the next and before I knew it, I had met many Photo Leaguers; I was doing a big exhibition; and I was representing a handful of them, which for me was very, very important. Not only did it open up a whole world that fascinated me, but it took me into that part of my gallery’s life that I think became the most important part: the rediscovery of photographers who had significant lives in photography and then were just sort of forgotten. They were the photographers who didn’t get into Beaumont Newhall’s History of Photography. I became interested in the idea of bringing those photographers to the current photo world’s attention. That was relatively easy to do, both because most of the galleries were concerned with the already very famous photographers, and because most of these people were still alive and very willing. It also gave my gallery an identity, a certain credibility, and by happy accident, the photo world as it existed in the 1980s was very receptive to learning more of its own history. As I’ve said in many ways before, that’s why I credit Woodstock and what was possible in Woodstock, for everything that became the stepping-stone for me to go on and develop the kind of gallery I have.

In Woodstock and the Hudson Valley, there were great, great treasures all over the place. Not too many people recognized them, because the value of these things was just starting to develop. The photo market wasn’t at its beginning, but it was at a quiet point. The first wave of the ’70s was over and there was a recession around 1980. Things quieted down for a few years. One of the many treasures, perhaps the most important one, was the one that gave me the impetus and the money to start the Photography Center. I looked for obsessively, and finally found, what turned out to be a complete, mint, bound, slip-cased set of Alfred Stieglitz’s Camera Notes and the first thirty-two issues, bound in suede, year-by-year, of his Camera Work. I read these from cover to cover and learned so much. I was totally immersed in that period of photography history. They were too valuable for me to hang on to, so I sold them. I didn’t know anybody in the photo world at that time, and I wound up selling them to Harry Lunn (1933–1998), the Washington, D.C., dealer. I was introduced to Harry by Todd Watts, Berenice Abbott’s printer, and a friend of the family.

I was able to do two things with that money. I bought my first little house, and, perhaps more importantly, I used $5,000 as seed money to start the Photography Center. That was kind of Stieglitz blood money for me. As a New Age, anti-capitalist sort, I felt a little guilty about cashing in on Camera Work. Converting some of that money into a nonprofit for photography helped the guilt to disappear. I suppose it was my first giant step to becoming a dealer, although I didn’t realize it at the time.

Henri Cartier-Bresson, Hyères, 1932, HCB/Magnum; Courtesy Fondation HCB.

Was it traumatic moving to New York, after years in a rural area?
Well, I didn’t move physically to New York, when I opened the gallery in 1986. In the beginning, I spent only three-and-a-half days a week in New York. I had an apartment, a studio down in Soho, but I was still living in Woodstock. It took a few more years until I was here most of the time. Even though I’m from Brooklyn, I had never really lived and worked in Manhattan. I certainly was never a professional person in Manhattan, so it was scary to leave the womb of Woodstock and go into the real world of New York. The other thing was that New York in the mid-‘80s was not a kind place to be. Those were the heavy drug and graffiti days. There were window-washer guys and muggings. Street crime was way up at that point. I made a little promise to myself that if I couldn’t afford to take a cab wherever I needed to go around town, I would pack it up and go back to Woodstock. I needed to know that I could afford to live safely. It was a non-issue after a short while, but in the beginning, that’s what moving to New York represented, and it was a little daunting.

So you established Photofind in Soho in 1986. Then you changed the name to the Howard Greenberg Gallery in 1991 while remaining in Soho. Finally, in 2003 you moved to 57th Street, where you are today. What was the thinking behind the name change?
When I was in Woodstock, what I did was to find old photographs, so I called the business Photofind. When I moved to New York, I struggled with what to name the gallery. Since I had some recognition built up as Photofind, I kept the name. By the time my first five years on Spring Street were over, I realized that was a big mistake. It should have been my own name. And so I changed it, and at that time a lot of people thought that the Howard Greenberg Gallery was a brand new gallery. They didn’t know it was Photofind Gallery. To this day, some people who knew Photofind have no idea it was the Howard Greenberg Gallery. Once I moved to Wooster Street, just around the corner, and changed the name, everything changed. It was a larger gallery, a more prominent kind of gallery, and it had a real gallery name. And things took off. It wasn’t opened at a great time. It was 1991. That was after the Japanese economic bubble had burst, and we were in another recession, but from the day I moved, the photo market only got better. It was a great run after that.

I’ll just add something about the press. People at The New York Times during that period of time — Chuck Hagen, Vicki Goldberg, one or two others — really liked what I was doing in the gallery. I had six or seven years in which virtually every show resulted in a review in The New York Times, and many of them received large reviews. That helped build the visibility, the credibility, of the gallery enormously in those years, and I’m very thankful for it. Now maybe I get a Friday review in The New York Times once every three years. I’m not happy about that, but things were different back then, and it was great for a photography gallery like mine, with reviewers who were schooled and interested in the history of the medium.

One of the great coups in your career was obtaining the estate of Edward Steichen (1879–1973). Could you tell us how you obtained it?
Well, I was shocked that there was a Steichen estate. A couple of people dropped hints early on that Joanna Steichen [Steichen’s widow] still had some prints and I thought, okay, maybe she has a few prints, and I’d love to meet her at some point and see what she has. That was on my mind for several years, and then finally we did meet. She showed me some very nice things at her apartment here in New York. She’d already sold a few through a couple of other dealers, and she was willing to let me try to sell one or two. We did well together. We progressed. Then she finally had me out to Montauk, where all the others were stored. I’ll never forget the moment. It was one of the highlights — maybe the highlight of my career — and certainly a major highlight of my life. I mean she had literally hundreds of great, great Steichen prints. We sorted out our differences, and we went to work together. It was the best thing that ever happened, and I’m happy to say we’ve had a terrific relationship ever since.

Margaret Bourke-White, Aerial of Parachute Jump and Beach at Coney Island, Brooklyn, N.Y., 1951; Courtesy The Howard Greenberg Gallery.

Something like seven hundred pictures?
Something like that. We catalogued, most of them, and, yes, I’d say there were around seven hundred pictures. And the real beauty of it, from my point of view, was that she didn’t have just one print of this or that great Steichen. She often had two or three or even four or five fabulous prints of the most important images, so I was able to satisfy museums and collectors everywhere. You know, usually when you get an estate, even a fresh estate, the best pictures are gone pretty quickly. In the Steichen collection, the top layer, the “cream,” was enormous, unlike anything I’d ever experienced. So all my best clients and all the people I know — and there are a lot — all found something that they wanted. So I was able to sell a huge number of pictures for very good prices. I established a new price tier in the market, which the work deserved. It was Steichen, and these were the greatest examples (with the exception of the master prints at the Metropolitan, of course). Yes, it was a great, great moment.

Do you have the archive of the work of Arnold Newman (1918–2006)?
Yes, I co-represent Arnold Newman’s estate with Ron Kurtz of Commerce Graphics. Arnold left behind around thirty thousand photographs and collages. It’s quite extraordinary. Arnold was obsessive about creating prints, storing them well, and categorizing them. It’s an archive that’s in amazingly good shape. Today it is housed in a storage facility that doubles as a work space. I’ve looked through pretty much all of it at this point, and I’m completely amazed. I’ve never seen such an extensive and interesting archive. He photographed everyone who was anyone during the middle and latter part of the twentieth century. We did five exhibitions with Arnold. Unfortunately, Arnold passed away before the last one, which was planned with him and which had a book, and which in many ways was perhaps the most important one for us. I learned that his work is much deeper, much richer than people know, and that’s what prompted the Early Photographs show and book, which is not about portraits. Arnold and several curators tended to perpetuate the same pictures, the same portraits, but to see Arnold in his totality is to see a brilliant artist and thinker.

Arnold Newman, Pablo Picasso, Vallauris, France,1954

You’ve had a booth at the Beijing Art Fair for the last two years. What has been the response of the Chinese to your kind of photography?
That’s a good question. My mission — and I was the only gallery at the fair who was on this mission — was to introduce them to classic “Western” photography. Of course, to me, that could include Japanese. I’ve been very fortunate in that I have two Chinese partners. When I say partners, I don’t mean a legal partnership, simply a great association.

I met one of them, Laura, at Paris Photo about three years ago. She and a college friend, Richard, who lives in Beijing, are both knowledgeable and interested in Western art and photography. They wanted to bring this to China to show it to their friends and contacts and develop a business. So we forged a relationship, and they enabled me to do all this work in China. I would not have gone on my own, not at all. I had written off the idea of China because there are dense layers to get through, and there seemed to be no reason to try. But working with these two really terrific people has enabled me to negotiate the land mines in doing business in China, including the art fairs. Half the battle is getting there and selling pictures, but the other half is actually getting the money out of the country. They have different rules. So it’s very challenging. We’ve done well, but by-and-large the Chinese buyer of art is interested only in Chinese work. It’s all they know about. But worse than that is that to a person — I didn’t hear anybody waver from this position — their primary interest is in making investments. The ugly “I” word. They want to know that anything they buy is going to be a good investment. I think a lot of these people are spoiled, because anything you touched in China during the last five or ten years, as long as you had money to start with, you could spin into gold. And so I discovered an interesting mentality there. People can like the work and want to learn more about it, but they are very hesitant to buy because they don’t yet feel comfortable enough to believe that it’s a good investment. So that’s what we’ve been tackling in China; however, given that obstacle, we actually did well in both fairs.

What about esoteric places like Dubai?
Beijing is about as esoteric a place as I’ve been to. Photography dealer Bonni Benrubi did the Dubai art fair in 2007. She said it was interesting, but she did not return the next year. I haven’t done any of those — Dubai or Abu Dhabi. Paris is as exotic as I’ve gotten, besides this foray to Beijing. That said, I believe the market for photography still has very good legs. Actually, we have seen the strong growth in Europe, during the past ten years, and Japan just before that. Now, with the new-found wealth, it’s only beginning in China and other Asian countries, as well as India and the Middle East. Even in Korea, I’m seeing people put real time and energy into opening galleries and starting museum collections. It’s not very widespread at this point, but I do believe there’s plenty of room for growth in the future in the marketplace.

What are some of the under-recognized pockets in the marketplace, areas you would recommend for new collectors who aren’t ready to spring for the really high prices, but who are looking for bargain-priced, but still very “respectable,” work?

You know, I’m very big on New York street photography from the mid-twentieth century. I still think that even though those photographers and that work have become more recognized in different ways, the growth potential is enormous because people continue to respond enthusiastically to the work when they see it. It was not a part of the photo market that had been shown very much, especially in the early years. Now it’s more prevalent. My experience in the gallery — because I have a lot of it, and therefore sell a lot of it — is that it’s growing, and the prices still seem very reasonable.

So you’re thinking 1950s.
Well, I think Jane Livingston [former curator at the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., and author of The New York School: Photographers, 1936–1963, Stewart, Tabori, & Chang, 1992] defined the New York School years in her book as a little before World War II up to the early ’60s — that whole period. You know, there’s an expression that “the fifties ended” in 1963 when Kennedy was assassinated. That whole period is ripe. It was the first generation of personally expressive street photographers, as opposed to purely documentarians, like the FSA or Photo League photographers. By “personally expressive,” I mean guys like Louis Faurer and William Klein and many others. Their work still has legs.

Can you think of any other pockets that you would especially recommend to people?
Again, in postwar photography, the late ’60s through the ’70s period is being looked at again. There’s been a wave, the Winogrand/Arbus/Friedlander wave, that’s already happened. With the exception of Winogrand, the work has become expensive and oversold in the market. But there are others: Bruce Davidson comes to mind. Curators and collectors now seem to be very interested in these American 1960s–70s photographers.

The others pockets are recently discovered bodies of color work from the 1950s through the 1970s. Indeed, we have had more interest and success with Saul Leiter’s color photographs from the 1950s than any other work in the gallery, during the past three or four years. Early Polaroid work also seems to be taking off.

Eikoh Hosoe, Ordeal by Roses (Barakei) #32, 1961; Courtesy The Howard Greenberg Gallery.

In a sea of art galleries in general and photography galleries in particular, what makes your gallery stand out?
First and foremost, I have always insisted that I have a friendly gallery. That comes from a genetically negative reaction to the classic white-walled, blank-face, intimidating art gallery. I’m a friendly kind of person. I enjoy people; I enjoy talking to them. I always want my gallery to be in that image. I want it to be a place where people can walk in and not feel intimidated, a place where they feel like there’s someone to talk to and something to learn. You know, it’s not always easy, because you get different people working for you, and there’s a different chemistry and combination of personalities, but on the whole, every gallery, every movement of my gallery — from Woodstock to Spring Street to Wooster to 57th Street — has gone more and more in the direction of user-friendly.

This gallery, if you’ll notice, is designed in a very different way from virtually all others. I worked with Lubrano Ciavarra Design, a team of very talented young women. I told Anne Marie Lubrano that I wanted the gallery to have a certain elegance, a certain class about it, but I wanted it to feel residential. I wanted people to feel at home and she interpreted that with wood and warm colors. I like the way black-and-white photographs with white mats look on warm-colored walls as opposed to white walls. I put a lot of the staff and books up front. That was to let people know we are accessible as soon as they walk in.

And then there’s more. This was not by intention, but my inventory has grown enormously, perhaps foolishly. There are thirty thousand pictures on the premises of the gallery. I really have a lot of interesting and diverse photography here for the viewer who is interested in looking and exploring. What I have in the gallery, I think, is more interesting than what is in most other galleries. They may not all be the biggest names, but certainly, the foundations of photography and the art of photography are here in this gallery.

Originally published at Focus Fine Art Photography Magazine.