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, the national award for arts writing. He is also the author of 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.[2] 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. 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:


The Daily Beast:

Art & Auction:

Aperture:

Exhibition Catalogue Essays:

Bibliography

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Art Critic (2009-06-02). "Looking in on photographer Robert Frank". Sfgate.com. Retrieved 2009-09-12.
  2. ↑ "Vanishing Point". Metropolismag.com. 2008-01-16. Retrieved 2009-09-12.
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