Originally Posted by
Drew Wiley
Well, I will answer you, Pieter. In that case, it was a high-end photo gallery in a prime high-lease downtown SF location. I got acquainted with the owner when a different and even more pricey venue a little ways away was showing my work. But he specialized in rare, generally one of a kind, very early photos, though not exclusively. Lovely exquisite images, even when he showed modern color work, collectibles. But he could also be an ornery skinflint hoping to cut corners when it came to his storage room. When he sought my advice, and I told him to use either stainless or chrome wire racks with good air circulation for his portfolio box storage, he had the nerve to cuss me out, and insisted he was going to use particle board shelving, and had already hired the carpenter. When the formaldehyde risk finally got through to him, he called a London art conservator who was an expert in marble statures (but knew little about photographs), who advised him to seal the particle board with a highly specialized sealant called Bedacryl, available only to art conservators. So the gallery owner asked if I could get it for him, which I hypothetically could have, since we had an industrial department with a direct 3M industrial account.
But Bedacryl is a solvent product high in sulfur, and even worse. So I informed him I could not in good faith supply it to him for such purposes. So he went ahead anyway, and just stashed his print boxes on raw particleboard shelving. Those prints were sold for around seven to eight thousand dollars per print, and clients often paid around $30,000 per box, quite a sum in the 80's. Opening those boxes six months later, and seeing no image at all on the paper in many instances - the next thing was a phone call to a lawyer, seeking to sue the gallery.
That wasn't a unique case, by any means, but probably the most memorable for its peculiarities. Henceforward I never allowed my own work to be shown in any gallery unless I visited their back room first, and I did see see some horror stories in other venues too, including the entire life work or a famous photographer half-ruined by a leaky back room roof. I hesitate to mention that gallery's name because the second generation has its own gallery of high repute, and serious photo galleries are still relatively uncommon, and I don't want sons held to account for the sins of their fathers. Even the careless guys did photography a real favor by getting serious photographers in the public eye who we here on the West Coast wouldn't have otherwise known. Those galleries were pioneers in that respect, and were willing to lose money for love of the medium. They were mainly people who had already made a ton of money doing something else first. Too bad they trended rather naive when it came to properly handling things.
So no, this was not just another predictable gallery experiment gone wrong. They were well established with a strong collector clientele in a prime location, but then made a huge mistake. It not like now, with downtime crime exploding, and downtown lease pricing gone stratospheric due to techie gentrification driving everything else out. That whole SF crown jewel of Union Square is hollowing out at the moment, and the city is getting pretty alarmed.
Such "claims" are hardly "extraordinary" at all, not for someone who was in the business of supplying materials in volume to an especially wide spectrum of clients. Just another day in the office. Far weirder stories could be told about unreasonable military uses for commodities, often in a distinctly unhealthy manner; it's just that more people have already heard of that category of abuse. And galleries were hardly even worth our time, but they sought me out for technical advice, so we accommodated them. Friends of Photography was a predictable cyclic customer we supplied. But in terms of art galleries, even now there seems to be an almost dismal ignorance of properly handling and displaying what they sell. They might or might not deal with a frame shop offering archival framing. But it's not at all uncommon to find prints thumbtacked or L-pinned to gallery walls repainted just a day or two before, and still outgassing, or put in wooden frames with unsealed rabbets and unsuitable backings. I dealt with museum display facilities too; but they were given very tight parameters by staff conservators; so that was a different situation entirely.
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