Helen Gee: 1910-2004

Afterimage, Nov-Dec, 2004 by Bruno Chalifour

Helen Gee, a pioneer in sales of photos as art, died at age 85 in a hospice in Manhattan on Oct. 14, 2004. In the 1950s, Helen Gee's Limelight Photography Gallery in Greenwich Village became a pioneering blueprint for the offering and selling of photography as an art form. Limelight opened in May 1954 and was supported by the adjoining coffeehouse. Although a market in fine photographs was almost nonexistent, for about seven years Limelight carried on as if there were one, setting the standard for successors in the early 1970s and grew into a flood by the 1990s. Ms. Gee mounted new shows at roughly five-week intervals and wrote the news releases.

Two earlier galleries, Alfred Stieglitz's 291 early in the 20th century and Julien Levy's in the 1930s, had tried to sell photographs but without success. Limelight did somewhat better; an Atget show, with the prints made by Berenice Abbott ($20 each) was almost a sellout, and more than half the pictures in an Edward Weston exhibition ($75 each) were bought. Rare photographs, photograms and photomontages by Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (priced between $100 and $200) failed, however, to sell. Prints by Robert Frank ($25 each) and Julia Margaret Cameron ($65 each) found only a few buyers. Limelight was the showcase for a wide variety of photographic styles, from classic straight photography (Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham) to social documentary (Brassai, Lisette Model, W. Eugene Smith) and subjective and experimental work (Rudolph Burckhardt, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind). Such a roster differed sharply from the generally homogeneous fare found in popular picture magazines like Life and Look.

Before opening Limelight, Ms. Gee had been a successful retoucher of color transparencies. She briefly took photography courses with Alexey Brodovitch, Model, and Sid Grossman, but what Ms. Gee lacked in coffeehouse experience, she made up for in iron determination, familiarity with the Village art and photography worlds, and personal charm.