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Vast photo collection shown in S.F. warehouse
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Opinion
1-3 of 21
Galleries
Sam Whiting, Chronicle Staff Writer (page 1 of 2)
Sunday, May 9, 2010
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In the small world of photography collecting, investment banker Andy Pilara was a complete unknown until the day he walked into San Francisco's Fraenkel Gallery and walked back out with the first picture he had ever bought, a Diane Arbus.
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Seven years later, Pilara, 68, has built a collection of 20th century American documentary photography so vast and comprehensive that he had to rent a vacant warehouse on the Embarcadero just to display it.
Russell Yip / The Chronicle
Andy Pilara of San Francisco has opened the largest gallery space for photography in the country on Pier 24.
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Located below the Bay Bridge, Pier 24 offers 28,000 square feet of display space. To put that in perspective, it is four times the size of the photography galleries on the third floor of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, one of the largest dedicated photography spaces at any museum in the United States.
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To visit SFMOMA will cost you $15. To visit Pier 24 is free if you make an appointment. Pilara has bought California Republicans gear up to 2,000 vintage pictures and opened the single largest take on Obama 03.21.11 venue for looking at photography in this city and this Barry Bonds trial: Expect a state and this country. It is not a museum, because 'heavyweight' fight 03.20.11 there are no boards or committees or docents or fundraisers. It is not a commercial gallery, because nothing is for sale. Man killed in Market Street hit and run 03.21.11
The experience is overwhelming, which is the intent. "I hope it means they come back," says Pilara, who had never seriously collected anything except baseball cards while growing up in the Sunset District. "It's a passion that I can't put words to." "I have not seen anything like it," says SFMOMA curator of photography Sandra Phillips, who has seen every major photography repository in the Western world. "There are photography museums, but nothing so spectacular and so personal and so giving to the experience of looking at a photograph. The whole thing is truly unique." The "photography space," as Pilara calls it, has not had an official opening. The Web site, at www.pier24.org, is not yet live, and there is no signage. But in the few months since word has leaked out, Pier 24 has attracted curators from the National Gallery of Art in Washington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney
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"It is absolutely a world-class collection that brings tremendous value to San Francisco as a key center for the study of photography," says gallery owner Jeffrey Fraenkel, who recently took one of London's premier gallerists through the collection. That takes an hour and a half to do right, and that is without any wall text or even the names of the photographers. That is just to see the 300 pictures, or 15 percent of the entire body of work, that are now on display. The spree started when Pilara was taken by his wife, Mary, a volunteer docent in painting at SFMOMA, to see "Revelations," the Diane Arbus retrospective co-organized by Phillips, which opened at SFMOMA in October 2003.
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Arbus, who took her own life in 1971, was interested in photographing people whom most avoid looking at, and Pilara was deeply moved by it. He walked from the show to his apartment on Market Street, and he looked up the Arbus estate's representatives. That is when he first learned of Fraenkel Gallery on Geary, which over the past 30 years has established itself as one of the most respected photo galleries in the country. The next day, Pilara walked to the Fraenkel Gallery, which is about the same distance as walking from his home to SFMOMA. "At the beginning, other than buying a photograph that was extremely unusual as an acquisition, I wasn't paying a great deal of attention to him," Fraenkel says. "No one, not I and not even he, knew what was ahead in terms of his ambition."
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Pilara says his main ambition was "to exercise the other side of my brain," meaning the side that doesn't do math. The math side was disengaged so well that he doesn't know how much he has invested in photography, or the build-out of the space, and he doesn't want to know. He is an art dealer's dream. "In the investment world, I look at every number to the penny," Pilara says. "This is not an investment, so I don't really pay attention to what it costs." 1 | 2 | Next Page Âť PRINT
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Most Popular Comments clodagh831 7:11 AM on May 9, 2010 Am growing really tired of being tricked into clicking on a story only to find out it will be days before I can read it. This is going to backfire on you so why not just stop? It is incredibly stupid. REPLY
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jdonegan 10:55 AM on May 11, 2010 I would love to see his work as a photographer, now that he has developed his unique perspective as a collector. I hear the biggest collectors of photography are other photographers. REPLY
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theloniousbop 8:59 AM on May 9, 2010 Why are you telling us this now? Why not just run it on Tue? Waste of your and our time. REPLY 1 reply
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