Sean Corcoran (Curator of Prints and Photographs, Museum of the City of New York)

Moderator: Mary Engel 

Sunday March 10, 2024

9:15 – 9:45 am check in/coffee

9:45 am Awards review / “In Memoriam”

10:00 – 11:30am

Panel 3 – State of the Art Market: Navigating Galleries and Auctions Today

Stephen Perloff  (The Photo Review)

Alice Sachs Zimet (Arts + Business Partners)

1145am – 1:15pm

2:30 – 4:00

Panel 5 – Best Practices in Archive Management 

Margit Erb  (Saul Leiter Foundation)

Robert Gurbo (Andre Kertesz Estate)

Amanda Smith (MUUS Collection)

Moderator: Stephen Perloff

4:15 – 5:15pm

Breakout sessions

5:30 Conference ends…

PANELIST BIOS 

DON CARLETON 

Dr. Don Carleton is the founding executive director of the Dolph Briscoe Center for American History (1991) and he holds the J. R. Parten Chair in the Archives of American History at the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin). He is the author of fourteen books, including Red Scare; Conversations with Cronkite; Struggle for Justice: Four Decades of Civil Rights Photography; and The Governor and the Colonel: A Dual Biography of William P. Hobby and Oveta Culp Hobby.  

He also edited and contributed the preface to Flash of Light, Wall of Fire: Japanese Photographs Documenting the Atomic Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (University of Texas Press, 2020), which Vogue Italia recognized as one of the notable books of photography published in 2020. Dr. Carleton has worked as a historian, lecturer, and researcher in Nicaragua, Australia, Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Israel, the Czech Republic, Poland, and Romania. As a history faculty member at UT-Austin, he has taught a graduate seminar on methods and sources, which featured the use of photographs for historical research. In October 2020, Carleton launched the Briscoe Center’s podcast, “American Rhapsody,” which he hosts. In 2015, the Texas Democracy Foundation honored him with its Bernard Rapoport Award for support of the First Amendment.

SEAN CORCORAN 

Sean Corcoran is the Senior Curator of Prints and Photographs at the Museum of the City of New York. He previously served as Assistant Curator of Photography at George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY. His exhibitions have included Through a Different Lens: Stanley Kubrick Photographs, Brooklyn: The City Within: Photographs by Alex Webb and Rebecca Norris Webb and the Museum’s inaugural contemporary photography Triennial, New York Now: Home. He has written extensively on photography, contributing to more than two dozen publications, including essays for Elliott Erwitt: At Home and Around the World (Aperture), and I See a City: Todd Webb’s New York
(Thames & Hudson), Loisaida: Street Work 1984-1990 by Tria Giovan (Damiani) and others. 

MARGIT ERB

Margit Erb is the founder and director of the Saul Leiter Foundation. She represented Leiter at Howard Greenberg Gallery from 1996 until the artist’s death in 2013, also assisting him in organizing his archive. She has worked on all of Leiter’s books, including his first monograph, Early Color (Steidl, 2006), and she coproduced the 2013 documentary In No Great Hurry: 13 Lessons in Life with Saul Leiter. In the years since Leiter’s passing, the foundation has coproduced museum exhibitions and book releases worldwide, including the 2023 exhibitions Saul Leiter: Assemblages at Les Rencontres d’Arles and Saul Leiter: Origins in Color at the Bunkamura Museum of Art, Tokyo. Today, Margit, along with her husband, Michael Parillo, maintains Leiter’s extensive archive of photographs and paintings, located in the artist’s former studio in New York City’s East Village. The foundation recently published two books with Thames & Hudson, The Unseen Saul Leiter and Saul Leiter: The Centennial Retrospective.

CARA ERDMAN  

Cara Erdman is a Licensing Executive & Manager of Membership Services at Artists Rights Society, where she works with artists to demystify the world of copyright and handles licensing deals in a number of industries including consumer products, fashion & apparel, museums & education and more. Previously, she worked in development at CUE Art Foundation, supporting grants for exhibitions for emerging and under-recognized artists in New York City. 

PATRICK K. LIN

Patrick K. Lin is an attorney and researcher focused on AI, privacy, and copyright. He is the author of Machine See, Machine Do, a book about technology, history, and policy. Currently, Patrick is the Judith Bresler Fellow at the Center for Art Law, where he oversees the Center’s clinical program, focusing on topics in copyright, legacy and estate planning, and artist-dealer relations. 

STEPHEN PERLOFF 

Stephen Perloff is the founder and editor of The Photo Review, a critical journal of international scope publishing since 1976, and editor of The Photograph Collector, the leading source of information on the photography art market. He is also the editor of The Daguerreian Society Quarterly and The Daguerreian Annual. He has curated more than a score of exhibitions and is a recipient of the Colin Ford Award for Curatorship from the Royal Photographic Society. He also has a long career as an exhibiting photographer and his photographs reside in many museum and private collections.

AMANDA SMITH

Amanda Smith is the director of archives at MUUS Collection. She specializes in organizing, managing, interpreting and providing access to photographers’ archives, especially those of underknown yet prolific creators. Most recently she led the processing of the Deborah Turbeville archive, assisted in the curation of the traveling exhibition Deborah Turbeville: Photocollage and acted as editorial manager for its companion monograph (Thames & Hudson 2023). Formerly the assistant director and head archivist at The Gordon Parks Foundation, Smith led the foundation through a pivotal period in its growth and supported the production of many exhibitions as well as a dozen books. She holds a master’s degree in photographic preservation and collections management from Ryerson University and a bachelor’s degree in art history and American studies from Rutgers University. 

ANDREW SMITH 

Andrew Smith started his photography business in 1974, in Santa Fe, working with prints by Edward Curtis. In 1975, as a member and eventual director of the Center of the Eye Photography Collaborative, he began to work with a variety of contemporary artists. He graduated from the University of New Mexico law school in 1982 and practices law for 3 years while engaged in his photography business. He opened a public gallery, Andrew Smith Gallery, Inc. in Albuquerque, New Mexico in 1984, moving the gallery to Santa Fe in 1986. Moved to Tucson in 2018 and will be scaling back the public space to an office in the fall of 2024.

Over the last 50 years the Andrew Smith Gallery in Albuquerque, Santa Fe and Tucson has presented over 150 exhibitions and hosted over 1,000,000 visitors. It has bought, sold and brokered the sale of approximately 200,000 photographs, worth more than $150,000,000.00. He has worked with and represented many many hundreds of photographers during this time

The gallery is best known by collectors and museums as the international source for significant 19th and 20th century photographs of the American West, Ansel adams, Contemporary Indigenous Photographers as well as for working with large collections and archives.  He has been working on artists legacy projects for over 20 years.

ALICE SACHS ZIMET 

Alice Sachs Zimet  is President, Arts + Business Partners, a consulting boutique which she founded in 1999 specializing in the fine art photography marketplace. 

As a collector, advisor, and educator, Zimet began to collect fine art photography in 1985 and has amassed a museum-quality collection of over 350+ images by 141 different photographers from 20th Century masters to the present.

Zimet is Chair, Photography Curatorial Committee, Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge; Chair, Collections Committee, International Center of Photography (ICP), New York; Board Member, Magnum Foundation, New York; Advisory Board Member: Center of Photography at Woodstock (CPW), Kingston, and American Photography Archives Group (APAG), NewYork. She teaches regularly for Christie’s Education, the ICP School, Maine Media College +Workshops, and the Colorado Photographic Art Center (CPAC) where she teaches workshops on how to collect photography and how photographers can better access the marketplace.Zimet pioneered the field of corporate sponsorship as Director, Worldwide Cultural Affairs,The Chase Manhattan Bank (20 years) where she used the arts as a strategic marketing tool across 14 countries and 20 US cities, generating $2 Billion in new business for the bank.  She is Adjunct Professor, New York University’s Graduate Program, Arts Administration.