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Still Life, Street Life
Jean Dykstra
04/01/2004
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Most of the photographs in Siegel’s
collection have doubled or tripled in value. He is the owner of, among other
things, a vintage print of Arbus’s famous Twins. Model was an influential
teacher of Arbus, encouraging her intimate, intense portraits of so-called
“freaks” and fringe cultures, and it was through Model that Siegel first became
enamored of Arbus’s enigmatic portraits. San Francisco dealer Jeffrey Fraenkel’s
1967-68 print of Arbus’s well-known images, Teenage couple on Hudson Street,
N.Y.C., 1963, which bears an original label on the back marked $65, demonstrates
just how far off the charts the prices of the artist’s work have gone: If he
were to sell that photograph today, says Fraenkel, he would price it at more
than $200,000.
Michael Mattis and his wife, Judith Hochberg, also began
buying photographs years ago, when their graduate school stipends helped finance
their obsession with Edward Weston. She is a computational linguist at IBM; he
is a theoretical particle physicist who recently left his job at the Los Alamos
National Laboratory to devote his time to adding to his Weston collection. (This
compilation is traveling the country in a show that will be at the Utah Museum
of Fine Arts in Salt Lake City through April 11, then continue on to the
Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, S. C., through July 4.) “Weston
is the Picasso of photography. He sort of did it all,” says Mattis. “With most
photographers, you have to make a choice: Is the image the primary thing, or is
the print the primary thing? With Weston, no compromise is necessary.” For the
catalog accompanying the Weston show, Mattis wrote: “I think of Edward Weston’s
peppers, cabbages and shells as ‘elementary particles of photography’…. Like the
pioneer physicists of the time, Weston intuitively grasped the unity of it all.”
Mattis and Hochberg have clearly grasped the unity of all of Weston’s phases
of photography—collecting his images from Mexico, his portraits and his late
landscapes, as well as his more iconic still lifes and nudes, and doing their
best to make certain no elementary particles escape them. In 1994, the couple
and their children were about to leave for a camping trip, the family already
packed into the car, when Mattis spied a mail truck heading toward their house.
With the kids fussing in the back seat, he intercepted the mailman and found a
letter from a dealer notifying him that a signed, vintage print of Weston’s
Shell and Olla, 1927, was available for purchase. (“Vintage” is generally
understood to mean that the photographer made the print close to the time the
negative was made. Photographers may return to earlier negatives years later and
make new prints, but vintage prints are reliably more valuable, the idea being
that they reflect the photographer’s aesthetic vision at the time the negative
was made.) Mattis wanted to go back into the house to call the dealer, but his
wife convinced him to depart. Shortly thereafter, however, they pulled over at a
gas station, and as his disgruntled family waited in the baking car, Mattis
recalls, “I managed to track down the dealer, literally minutes ahead of three
other clients who had received the identical mailing.”
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