Dies

Daniel Wolf, 65, Dies; Helped Create a Market for Art Photography

Robert G. Mull 3 weeks ago

“Suddenly, absolutely overnight, 25,000 of the rarest photographs ever taken were off the market,” said Weston Naef, who helped Mr. Wolf plan the acquisition for the Getty and later became its first curator of photography. “It would be like someone removing half the gold from Fort Knox.”

Along with steady work for private clients, he also acted as a matchmaker of sorts, especially for young and under-the-radar artists. In 1997 he introduced the organizers of the Whitney Museum Biennial to Aaron Rose, an immensely talented photographer who was so hermetic that he had never participated in a major show. (He died in February at 84.)

Mr. Wolf lent 10 daguerreotypes by the 19th-century French photographer Joseph-Philibert Girault de Prangey in 2019 for a show at the Met Museum, in front of which he had hawked photos out of a suitcase more than 40 years before.

He collected friends

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Art collector Christopher Cardozo dies at 72

Robert G. Mull 1 month ago

Once Christopher Cardozo found his life’s purpose, he never wavered.

The art collector, dealer and publisher devoted his career to promoting the photography of Edward Curtis, who extensively documented Native American life in the early 20th century. As a result, Curtis’ work is much more accessible today.

“I was led to this,” Cardozo told the Star Tribune in 2018. “This is my soul’s purpose. Why I ended up on Earth at this particular time was to make this work available to people.”

Cardozo, who lived in Minneapolis, died Feb. 21 after suffering for several years following a stroke. He was 72.

He grew up in St. Paul and developed an early passion for photography. He stumbled across Curtis’ work in the 1970s after a friend noted its similarities with his own photographs of Indigenous people in Mexico.

“Their work was amazingly similar,” said his sister, Julie Cardozo. “That was the

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Barbara Ess, 76, Dies; Artist Blurred Lines Between Life and Art

Robert G. Mull 1 month ago

Barbara Ess, an artist and musician best known for plumbing the limits of perception with a pinhole camera, died on Thursday at her home in Elizaville, N.Y. She was 76.

The cause was cancer, according to Bard College, where she was an associate professor of photography.

In a varied career rooted in the downtown Manhattan art scene of the 1970s and ’80s, Ms. Ess sang and played guitar and bass in Y Pants, the Static and other “No Wave” bands — hard-charging rejoinders to the perceived commercialism of punk — and published an influential mixed-media zine.

But it was in 1983 that she found her muse when she happened upon an article about pinhole cameras in The New York Times. Admitting light directly through a tiny aperture with no focus mechanism, a pinhole camera was easy for Ms. Ess to build at home. Without the distortion of a lens,

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Naomi Rosenblum, Historian of Photography, Dies at 96

Robert G. Mull 1 month ago

Naomi Rosenblum, who wrote about the history of photography and helped elevate it as an art form, died on Feb. 19 at her home in Long Island City, Queens. She was 96.

The cause was congestive heart failure, her family said.

Dr. Rosenblum was the author of seminal works that helped bring scholarship and recognition to photography as a creative art form after practitioners, notably Alfred Stieglitz, had revolutionized the field by defying the conventions of subject matter and composition — creating images in the rain and snow, for example, or of a pattern that the sea cut in the sand.

Histories of photography traditionally focused on England, France and the United States. But Dr. Rosenblum’s major contribution, “A World History of Photography” (1984), provided a true global perspective. The book was translated into several languages and remains a standard text in the field.

Her other major work, “A

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