Philip Gefter

Philip Gefter

Philip Gefter is an American author and photography critic.^[1] He wrote the biography of Sam Wagstaff, Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe (Liveright/W. W. Norton & Company), for which he received the 2014 Marfield Prize,^[2] the national award for arts writing. He is also the author of George Dureau: The Photographs, (Aperture) and Photography After Frank, a book of essays published by Aperture in 2009. He was on staff at The New York Times for over fifteen years where, as Senior Picture Editor for Culture and, then, the Page One Picture Editor, he wrote regularly about photography.^[3] He continues to write in The New York Times, and his essays have appeared, as well, in Aperture, The Daily Beast, Slate, Art and Auction, The Getty Research Journal, and other publications.

In 2011, he and Richard Press (who were married in 2008) released their feature-length documentary entitled Bill Cunningham New York, about The New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham. The film received nominations for Best Documentary from The Directors' Guild of America; the Producers' Guild of America; and The Independent Spirit Awards. In 2013, it was acquired by the Film Department of The Museum of Modern Art for its permanent collection.

In 2011, Gefter received a Museum Scholar residency at the Getty Research Institute, The Getty Center, in Los Angeles, to work on a biography of Sam Wagstaff, the curator, collector, and patron of Robert Mapplethorpe, for the publisher W. W. Norton/Liveright, a project he began in 2009.

In 2002, he and Richard Press commissioned the architect, Michael Bell, to build a house for them in New York State's Hudson Valley. The Gefter-Press House, completed in 2007, is included in the book, American Masterworks: Houses of the Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries (Rizzoli), by the architectural historian, Kenneth Frampton

Gefter received a fine arts degree from the Pratt Institute in painting and photography.^[4] Upon graduation, he took a job as a picture researcher in the Time-Life Picture Collection, which gave him first-hand exposure to the photographs of Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, and Alfred Eisenstaedt, among a roster of other photographers who had set a standard for photojournalism in the twentieth century. Following that, he took a job at Aperture Foundation, where, as assistant editor, he worked on the Aperture History of Photography series and on publications such as Edward Weston: Nudes; America and Lewis Hine; and the re-publication of Robert Frank’s The Americans.

In 1982, Henry Geldzahler, then commissioner of cultural affairs for the city of New York, appointed him photography advisor to the Department of Cultural Affairs, where he put together a program of public exhibitions.

Beginning in the early ’70s, he was active in the gay rights movement, in the "Gay Activists Alliance;" Gay Academic Union;" and "Gay Media Coalition." He coauthored and was a subject of a book about his same-sex relationship, Lovers: The Story of Two Men (Avon Books, 1979). In 1981, he was a founding member of the Gay Men's Health Crisis, formed in Larry Kramer’s living room when the earliest cases of AIDS (still then yet to be named) were reported. In 1991, he was a founding member of the New York chapter of the National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association, serving as chapter president from 1993 to 1995.

Selected Published Articles

The New York Times:

• "Reinventing the International Center of Photography," New York Times, June 12, 2016
• "Review: Ellsworth Kelly's Love Affair With Photography," New York Times, March 24, 2016
• "A Bygone Time Captured Through the Lens of Walker Evans," New York Times, March 15, 2016
• ”Paul Graham and Seizing the Everyday Moments,” New York Times, February 21, 2016
• ”Mishka Henner Uses Google Earth as Muse,” New York Times, August 30, 2015
• “The Man Who Loved Photographs,” The New York Times, October 26, 2014
• “Those Royal Family Photos Started with Queen Victoria,” The New York Times, April 19, 2014
• “The Next Big Picture,” The New York Times, January 26, 2014
• “Robert Rauschenberg, Photographer,” The New York Times, October 20, 2013
• “On Robert Frank: Snapshots From The American Road,” The New York Times, Dec 14, 2008
• “Lee Friedlander’s Retrospective at The Museum of Modern Art,” The New York Times, May 29, 2005
• “Defining Beauty Through Avedon, The New York Times, Sept 18, 2005
• “Travels With Stephen Shore,” The New York Times, Jul 4, 2004
• “Icons As Fact, Fiction, and Metaphor,” The New York Times, Jul 23, 2007
• “Wagstaff and Mapplethorpe: The Aristocrat and the Photographer, The New York Times, Apr 25, 2007
• “On Ryan McGinley," The New York Times, May 6, 2007
• “Henry Wessel: Capturing the Image, Transcending the Subject,” The New York Times, May 21, 2006
• “Katy Grannan: Model American,” The New York Times, Aug 21, 2008
• “Why Photography Has Overtaken the Wall,” The New York Times, Apr 18, 2004
• "Photographers On the Other Side of the Lens," The New York Times, March 2, 2008
• “Philip-Lorca DiCorcia’s Day In Court," The New York Times, March 19, 2006
• “Mike Disfarmer: A Portrait of America,” The New York Times, Aug 22, 2005
• “A Thousand Words? How About $450,000?" The New York Times, March 13, 2005
• “On Marilyn Monroe Being Photographed,” The New York Times, Oct 03, 2004

The Daily Beast:

• “Allen Ginsberg’s Beat Memories,” The Daily Beast, Apr 29, 2010
• “Cartier-Bresson: The Father of Photojournalism,” The Daily Beast, Apr 8, 2010
• “Man Ray Revealed,” The Daily Beast, Nov 12, 2009
• “Zwelethu Mthethwa: Breaking Barriers in African Photography,” The Daily Beast, Aug 4, 2010
• "Elegy for Larry Sultan," The Daily Beast, Dec 17, 2009
• "On China’s Photography Boom," The Daily Beast, Jan 20, 2011
• "Women Photographers at The Museum of Modern Art," The Daily Beast, May 6, 2010
• "On The Voyeuristic Photograph," The Daily Beast, May 27, 2010
• “The Kings of Kodachrome,” The Daily Beast, Feb 18, 2010
• “Dreaming of Paris,” The Daily Beast, Jan 28, 2010
• "The Provoke Era in Japan," The Daily Beast, Oct 15, 2009
• “Bruce Davidson’s True Grit,” The Daily Beast, Nov 5, 2009
• “On Neil Winokur’s 1980s,” The Daily Beast, Oct 29, 2009

Art & Auction:

• “Keeping It Real: Photorealism,” Art & Auction, Jan 9, 2008

Aperture:

• “A Lover’s Discourse,” Aperture, The Queer Issue, No. 218, Spring, 2015
• “Interview with Quentin Bajac,” Aperture, No. 213, Winter, 2013
• “On Pier 24 in San Francisco,” Aperture, No 203: p 18
• “Two Robert Mapplethorpe Symposia,” Aperture, No 197: pp 82–85
• “Vince Aletti’s Magazine Collection,” Aperture, No 178: pp 58–69
• “Reading Newspaper Pictures,” Aperture, No 167: pp 2–9

Exhibition Catalogue Essays:

• “Flesh and Spirit: Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Wagstaff and the Gay Sensibility,” Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Medium, (Los Angeles: J. Paul Getty Museum, 2016)
• “Nature Mort,” Thomas Ruff, (London: Gagosian Gallery, 2015)
• “Who’s American Dream Is It?” Larry Sultan: Here and Home, (Los Angeles: The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 2014)
• Introduction, About Face, (San Francisco: Pier 24, 2013)

Bibliography

• Wagstaff: Before And After Mapplethorpe (New York: Liveright, 2014) ISBN 978-0871404374
• George Dureau: The Photographs (New York: Aperture, 2016) ISBN 978-1597112840
• Photography After Frank (New York: Aperture, 2009) ISBN 978-1597110952
• Lovers: The Story of Two Men (Avon Books, 1979) ISBN 978-0380430918
• Reports From The Holocaust, by Larry Kramer, (St. Martin's Press. 1994) ISBN 978-0312026349
• The Gay Metropolis, by Charles Kaiser, (1997, Houghton Mifflin) ISBN 978-0802143174
• Aperture, Winter 2001: "Interview with Philip Gefter, Page One Picture Editor of The New York Times"

Footnotes