APAG Board of Directors
Mary Engel, Executive Director & Founder
© Janette Beckman
Mary Engel is the Founder and Executive Director of the American Photography Archives Group, APAG, an award winning filmmaker and the director of the Orkin/Engel Film and Photo Archive. She is the author of “The Photo Archive Handbook What You Need to Know” (2024) and the co-editor of “Ruth Orkin A Photo Spirit” published by Hatje Cantz.
She is responsible for the annual APAG Conference, APAG auction, organizes “Out and About with APAG trips” and programming for the APAG Zoom meetings and much more. She founded APAG in 2000 with five heirs who had inherited archvies, and it now has close to 300 members.
Engel has been the director of the Ruth Orkin Photo Archive since its inception in 1985. She is responsible for all aspects of the archive including sales, licensing, marketing, legal issues, preservation and social media. Engel works with photography galleries, museums and auction houses in the United States and abroad. She has published four catalogs of photography.
Engel’s first film “Ruth Orkin: Frames of Life” premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 1996, and went on to screen at many other festivals. The film was selected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences as one of the “Outstanding Documentaries of 1996.” Her film “Morris Engel: The Independent” premiered on Turner Classic Movies, TCM in 2009. Engel is also a contributing producer of “Ordinary Miracles: The Photo League’s New York” released in 2011.
She has participated on panels at POWarts and Photoville, and the Center for Preservation of Artists Legacies (CPAL) and has spoken at Harvard University, New York University, the Brooklyn Historical Society, the St. Louis Art Museum and the Central Park Conservancy. She has been published in The New York Times, theAmerican Society of Media Photographers magazine, Photo District News and Film Comment. Recently, she has given presentations about her life at The National Arts Club, the Griffin Museum, School of Visual Arts, the East Bay Photo Collective and her alma Mater Washington University.
Engel is the 2017 recipient of the Griffin Museum of Photography – Focus Spotlight Award. She also completed the 2017 Seminar on Strategy for Artist-Endowed Foundation Leaders presented by the Aspen Institute Artist-Endowed Foundations Initiative (AEFI),
Grayson Dantzic, Executive Vice President
© Willie Chu
Grayson Dantzic is an archivist, curator, documentary videographer and photographer. He is a graduate of The Palmer School of Library & Information Science, Long Island University, with an M.L.S. plus a B.A. from Brandeis University. In 1999, he established the Jerry Dantzic Archives with his mother, Cynthia Dantzic, which is dedicated to the rediscovery and preservation of the photographic legacy of his father, Jerry Dantzic [1925-2006] a two-time Guggenheim Fellow. He is also project archivist for the Paul Seligman Collection/Metropolitan Opera Archives and others.
Dantzic has curated photographic exhibitions and presented at The Ogden Museum of Southern Art, New Orleans, LA; The Adelaide Festival Centre, Adelaide, Australia; The Shanghai Art Museum, China; The National Arts Club, NY, and the Archive As Project Conference (on behalf of APAG), Warsaw, Poland. He edited and wrote text for Jerry Dantzic’s “New York: The Fifties in Focus” (Edition Stemmle, 2002) and the upcoming “Billie Holiday at Sugar Hill” (Thames & Hudson, 2017). He is a co-founder with Mary Engel of the American Photography Archives Group where he has served as Executive Vice President since its formation in 2000.
Robert Gurbo, Board Member
Long time curator Robert Gurbo was a working photographer when he met Andre Kertész while employed in the Cultural Council Foundation’s CETA Artists Project. He worked with/for Kertész over the last seven years of Kertész’s life, and has spent over fifty years combing through Kertész’s archive. Gurbo is co-author of the catalog that accompanied the 2005 National Gallery exhibit, André Kertész, published by Princeton University Press. He is editor and author of Andre Kertész: The Early Years, and Andre Kertész: The Polaroids. He also organized the reissue of Kertész’s seminal book, On Reading.
Ernest Londa, Attorney
Ernest Londa, Esq. was born in 1956 in Danbury Connecticut. Soon thereafter his family moved to the Upper West Side of Manhattan where he grew into a young adult with keen interests in politics, theater, and the arts. After graduation from Duke University with training in Political Science, Psychology, and the Social Sciences he went to work as a paralegal at a well regarded Manhattan law firm. Londa attended an orthodox law school, The Fuchsberg Law Center, and eventually was admitted to the New York State Bar.
He immediately went to work for a local judge who had retired into private practice where he was trained in the conduct of a general civil practice which included real estate, estate work, business law, and arts law. Londa has managed his own general civil practice for the past fifteen years in midtown Manhattan.
Londa has been involved in the creation of, and has advisory roles with, numerous business ventures on behalf of his clientele, several of whom are working artists. He has known Mary Engel since childhood and has served with her on the board of APAG since its formation in 2000.
APAG Advisory Board
Sean Corcoran, Curator, mcny
Having grown up in the land of Kodak, Sean Corcoran may have been destined to go into the field of photography. Now the Senior Curator, Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York, Corcoran grew up in the Finger Lakes region of New York. “Growing up, Kodak was always a presence,” he says, “and I was always interested in and aware of photography.”
It didn’t hurt that Corcoran also had a collector’s mentality, even as a kid. “I was always interested in acquiring things and collecting things,” he says. That hasn’t changed: in addition to his job at the museum, he personally collects photography books and record albums, which run the gamut from Sun Ra to Graham Parsons, from punk to hip hop. “There’s something nice about a big dust jacket that you can read while you’re listening,” he says. “You have to be there, it demands your attention.”
The same can be said about photo books, and the narrative arc of a sequence of images that you follow while paging through them. In fact, it was books like Alexander Gardner’s photographic sketchbook of the Civil War and the geological survey photographs of the American West, says Corcoran, “that really pushed me to think of photography as a vein of history.”
After earning his BA, Corcoran became interested in exploring history through objects. He took a job at the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum (now the Strong Museum on Play) in Rochester, which at the time was a decorative arts and cultural history museum. His first project there was an exhibition about mourning, death, and dying, and the museum had just acquired a large collection of post-mortem photography that was later acquired by the George Eastman House. “That really opened my eyes to this whole other world of photography that I didn’t know anything about,” he says. After earning an MA from Syracuse University, he started working at the Eastman House (Now George Eastman Museum), where he stayed for eight years.
He came to the Museum of the City of New York eighteen years ago, and his first show was of photographs of the South Bronx by Ray Mortenson. “I’m proud of that show,” he says. “One of the things that I like about this position is that we show some of the best-known photographers, but also excellent work that maybe people haven’t seen before.” Since then he has curated exhibitions on the work of Leonard Freed, Stanley Kubrick, Fred W. McDarrah, Todd Webb and countless other themed and subject driven exhibitions,
MCNY has a far reaching mission, and one that dovetails with Corcoran’s interests, in that “we’re not strictly an art museum,” says Corcoran, “we’re really a history museum that shows art.”
That means that Corcoran culls from a wide range of sources to find the photographs best suited to representing the city. After Hurricane Sandy, for example, the show Rising Waters included work by professional photographers but also imagery Corcoran found by scouring Instagram and the web. “It was important to show images that were being shared instantly rather than just the ones going out days or weeks later. The show was an encapsulation of where photography is today,” he adds. “All the lines were blurred.”
Mark Lubell
With over a decade of experience as a C-level executive and a lifelong passion for visual culture and media, Mark Lubell has led several organizations to great success. Lubell has a proven track record of raising funds, building partnerships, and launching innovative programs that engage and educate diverse audiences.
Currently, Lubell is the co-founder of Vagrant Ventures, a company which looks to take photographic collections into the public domain for education and to ensure its preservation. He is also the founder of LHJM, LLC, a consultancy that helps clients develop online education and visual literacy strategies. Previously, Lubell was the executive director of the International Center of Photography, where he oversaw the institution’s relocation, expansion, and transformation into a thought leader in visual culture. Lubell has been recognized as an innovator of the year by American Photo for my pioneering approach to multi-media, blogs, and online community building. He is driven by a mission to inspire, empower, and connect people through the power of visual storytelling.
Alice Zimet, Artsandbusinesspartners
Alice Sachs Zimet is President, Arts + Business Partners (ABP) which she founded in 1999. She is Chair, Photography Curatorial Commi
ttee, Harvard Art Museums; Chair, Collections Committee, International Center of Photography (ICP); board member, Magnum Foundation; Advisory Board Member: Center of Photography at Woodstock (CPW) and American Photography Archives Group (APAG). She is on Faculty at Christie’s Education, the ICP School and Maine Media College + Workshops, where she teaches workshops for both collectors and photographers.
As a collector, advisor and educator, Alice began to collect photography nearly 40 years ago. Today, her collection comprises roughly 350 museum-quality photographs from the 20th Century to the present by 141 different photographers. Her collection offers a global and intimate portrait of people living their lives, with an emphasis on the role of the artist as creator, activist, and observer. Classic images by photographers like Berenice Abbott, Brassaï, and Lisette Model are represented, as are works by Magnum masters Henri Cartier-Bresson, Bruce Davidson, Susan Meiselas, Elliott Erwitt, Martine Franck, Steve McCurry, and others. The collection also features examples by Nan Goldin, Andres Serrano, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe, along with more recent images by Jess T. Dugan and Zanele Muholi. A respected educator and advisor in the field, Alice is recognized for both her connoisseurship and extensive knowledge of the photography market.
Zimet pioneered the field of corporate sponsorship as Director, Worldwide Cultural Affairs, The Chase Manhattan Bank (20 years). She is Adjunct Professor, New York University’s Graduate Program, Arts Administration teaching Corporate Sponsorship and the Arts. Alice holds a BA and MA degree in Art History, and began her career at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.