My Subversive Eye-part 1

I will be excerpting sections of my essay from the Dali Museum catalog, The Subversive Eye: Surrealist and Experimental Photography from the David Raymond Collection, published in 2024.

Subversive: tending or intending to subvert or overthrow, destroy, or undermine an established or existing system-From Dictionary.com

1960s—Long Island, New York

As a child, I had this recurring dream of stepping outside of my house late at night to gaze at multicolored moving lights that filled the sky. My neighbors were all outside gazing up too. They all seemed to be in a daze. To this day, a part of me feels that this might not have been a dream…

1970s—Long Island, New York

When I was ten, I started to collect comic books. I became such a fanatic that I memorized most of the values from the comic book price guide and started to buy and sell them. I also started collecting the original art. I was drawn to superheroes and a character named Howard the Duck and have vivid memories of going to the local stationery store to see when new comics would appear on the racks. Unbeknownst to me at the time, I was being led in a surreal direction… I’ve come to believe that the Surrealists were and are the original masters of what we now call the ‘multiverse’.

I grew up around people in the creative world; art critics, filmmakers, artists, performers, art dealers, singers, and photographers. It was a world that I felt comfortable in and which felt familiar. I purchased my first camera, an Instamatic with a rotating flash, when I was nine and immediately took to taking pictures at sleep-away camp. There, I learned to develop film and print my own work. This continued into college and beyond.

I also became interested in ‘out-of-body’ experiences and conscious dreaming and would practice often. I’m sure that André Breton was guiding me.

Mid–late 1980s—San Francisco

When I graduated from college (although I went to business school, I took a lot of fine art/photography electives), I moved to San Francisco to be close to my sister Doris. I hoped to discover what my life path would be. I started working at an art gallery on Union Street and soon found that not only was I good at selling art, but that I could sense ‘value’ and significance in a work even if others didn’t quite see it.

Late 1980s–late 1990s San Francisco

I dove into the photographic art market when I became a private dealer/broker. A client wanted to start a collection of California imagery. One of my first purchases for him was a large early exhibition print of Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother, and I went on to purchase other masterpieces in that field for him.

I found myself spending a lot of time in the main branch of San Francisco Public Library. They had a separate section of the library devoted to the arts, with large tables where you could pour over books. During one visit, I came upon the exhibition catalog L’Amour Fou, which had come to San Francisco in 1985. Upon opening that book, my focus shifted. I felt that I had found my creative ancestors and was inspired. I had known of Man Ray, Dalí, and Magritte, but WOW… so many other remarkable creators. The book’s essays were written by Rosalind Krauss and Dawn Ades, among others. Shortly after that epiphany, I tried to interest my photography client in a Raoul Ubac photograph that was coming up for auction at Christie’s in New York. I had previewed it and coveted it. He wasn’t interested. Too ‘out there’ for him. Needless to say, I could not afford it and had to watch it sell. What that sparked in me, though, was the desire to purchase works myself. Many years later, that Ubac photograph was offered to me by a Los Angeles dealer, and I bought it. It is now in the collection of the Cleveland Museum of Art (CMA) in Ohio.

Once the collecting spark took hold, I purchased anything of quality that I could afford, from snapshots, Hill & Adamson portraits, and Dorothea Lange ‘Dust Bowl and Depression’ images to Surrealist works. I was also able to spend time going through works in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art’s collection, actually handling pieces and examining them. Besides auction previews, this was the start of my education in connoisseurship. The different papers used, the way the paper ages, mounts, stamps, signatures, notations. SFMOMA has a large collection of Roger Parry vintage prints and I was overjoyed to spend time with them—there is nothing like the real thing. I also started to collect photography books, which fueled my knowledge and studies. Photography dealers in San Francisco and New York were very gracious in assisting in my knowledge-gathering, as was SFMOMA’s photo collecting group, Foto Forum, headed up by Sandra Phillips, the museum’s curator of photography.

I also got to know Paul Messier, who was leading an analysis of different photographic papers. It seemed that some photographs that were being sold as vintage were, in fact, not vintage. Paul found that most photographic papers after 1956 contain optical brighteners, which reveal themselves when a blacklight is shone onto the paper. I continue to use that technique, although there are some caveats; stashes of older photo paper still exist and some papers were made without brighteners. When my first collection was sold/gifted to the CMA, Paul oversaw the conservation of everything.

Ultimately, I found that I was drawn to work that challenged the way I see the world and that could reference the subconscious. Sounds like Surrealism…. The various works I purchased that did not fall into the realm of Surrealism or experimental got, for the most part, sold or traded.

At this time, I also started to form my own library, seeking out books to add to my visual and historical knowledge. After 30-plus years, my library contains a few thousand volumes. In addition to going and actually seeing works and connecting with them, the books led me to many other artists. I remember discovering a catalog for an exhibition of Surrealist photography in Spain that introduced me to the work of Marcel Lefrancq and Paul Nouge, both Belgian Surrealists. I found a copy of Lefrancq’s photo-illustrated book, Aux mains de la Lumière, which I purchased at a Paris auction and, later, two other copies. I never found a vintage piece by Nouge—I’m still looking!—TO BE CONTINUED….