Photography Thanks You, Helen Gee (1919-2004)
Helen Gee in her Jane Street apartment, ca. 1980. ©Frank
Paulin.
From CameraArts April /May, 2005
by Mary Ann Lynch
When Helen Gee opened “Limelight,” New York’s first
photography gallery and coffeehouse, she was pioneering and she knew
it. Talented photographers were abundant but hardly anybody was buying
photographs. Gee boldly set out to create “a place to exhibit,
a place to meet.” Following the European café model, Limelight
offered coffee and food in a pleasing atmosphere, with photographs reverently
displayed. The idea being that coffee would subsidize the gallery. No
one tells the story better than Gee herself in her frank, enthralling
memoir, Limelight: A Greenwich Village Photography Gallery and Coffeehouse
in the Fifties (1997, University of New Mexico Press. Quotes in
this article are from the book).
Limelight opened May 13, 1954—the start of seven years with Gee
ever grappling “with the problems of running the biggest and busiest
coffeehouse in New York and the first photography gallery in the country.”
Great Photographs, Limelight’s sixth show, opened December 1, 1954.
The day after Christmas, Gee lay sick in bed contemplating bankruptcy.
The telephone rang. A collector was at the gallery. “I jumped in
a cab,” Gee recounts, “and not until it pulled up at Limelight
did I realize I was wearing my bedroom slippers.” Gee “tried
to look cool, as if dealing with collectors was a regular occurrence,”
while the collector, Mrs. Eidlitz chose Harry Callahan, Bill Brandt,
W. Eugene Smith, Edouard Boubat, Lisette Model, Robert Doisneau, Brassai,
and Izis. She admired a Paul Strand but found the price outrageous:
“One hundred twenty-five dollars for a photograph?” Still,
the total for all would be just two hundred and twenty-five dollars.
The Westchester collector bought and Limelight survived, through January
31, 1961.
Afterward Gee made her living as an art consultant, moving back to photography
in the 1970s as a curator, lecturer, and writer. I first met Helen in
June 2000, at an opening for Eric Lindbloom at Gallery 292. A short
while after, I curated my second Not for Profit: Photographers Seeking
Social Change show, at Soho Photo Gallery. I invited Helen and she came.
I was moved by how she stopped in front of every photograph and studied
it. I mentioned this to Frank Paulin, who had showed at Limelight in
1957 and remained close friends with Gee until her death at eighty-five.
“Oh, she loved looking at photographs,” he said. People sometimes
ask him why Gee didn’t become a dealer. “She could have been
easily been a dealer or partners with anyone,” he told me. “But
she loved photography, loved the romance of it all. I think she did
not want to ruin that.”
Gee chose to close Limelight with a Julia Margaret Cameron show. “I
had always been interested in the lives of unique women, and if the
gallery had to close, I was glad it would close with the work of a gifted
woman.” It takes one to know one. Helen Gee is right up there with
the best of them, woman or man.
©2005
CameraArts
