Richard Gere hesitates to call the scores of photographs he has acquired over the years as a proper collection. “I just started buying things that I liked,” he tells The Hollywood Reporter in a phone interview, “and I suppose it’s a collection, but I don’t see myself as a collector.”
Yet when he recently went into Christie’s auction house in New York City to view around 40 of his photos displayed in a room, he felt moved seeing so many of them together. “It was objectively beautiful. It resonated so much with me. I’ve been living with them for 40 years and they are much deeper than just an image you see in a magazine or a book to me,” says the actor.
Christie’s isn’t being so unassuming in promoting its upcoming online auction of the works (which runs from March 23 to April 7) trumpeting it as “Photographs from the Richard Gere Collection.”
“Honed by years both in front of and behind a camera, Gere’s passion for image-making and collecting is on full view in this wonderfully diverse collection. These are artists who are masterful at capturing and eliciting human emotion, which resonated with Gere, as an actor,” says Darius Himes, Christie’s international head of photographs. “On display are highlights from the collection signifying a reflection of his time spent in Los Angeles, his admiration of 20th century photographers and the friendships he made along the way.”
156 lots are included in the sale, which carries a low estimate of just under $2 million and was headed by Christie’s photographs specialist Joslin Van Arsdale. The pieces span the history of the medium, beginning with photographs by 19th-century pioneers such as Gustave Le Gray and Carleton Watkins and moving onward to pieces by early 20th-century icons such as Tina Modotti, Edward Weston, Manuel Álvarez Bravo and Alfred Stieglitz.
CHRISTIE’S IMAGES LTD. 2022
Says Gere of Le Gray’s work, “He was shooting in the 1850s and 1860s. It was really the birth of photography and it was difficult to shoot horizons, and he found a way of putting negatives together, so his seascapes are extraordinary. One of my favorites of his is a picture of Napoleon the Second at a bivouac with his army and a horse is prominent. It’s kind of a dream-like, ghosted image from the early 1860s that is really extraordinary.”
More recent masters who are represented range from Robert Frank and Walker Evans to Joel Peter Witkin, Diane Arbus, Irving Penn, Graciela Iturbide, Horst P. Horst, Frederick Sommer, Weegee, Duane Michaels, Robert Mapplethorpe, Peter Beard, Richard Avedon, and Sally Mann. “One of my favorites is Irving Penn, who I met several times. I was completely absorbed in his work and his platinum prints are just extraordinary,” says Gere.
How did your interest in photography first spark?
I was always interested in photography from the first Brownie camera that I had when I was a kid. I had a fascination with film, of getting back negatives, which doesn’t happen anymore, seeing contact sheets and then later on deciding how to print them and what process. I’ve tried many different processes of my own photographs, from salt to platinum to silver and almost anything in between. That’s kind of been baked into me, an interest in images, whether it’s a dream-like suggested moment to one that’s definitive. The process itself of film is really interesting. There’s nothing really there. It’s just grain or in the current process it’s just ink that’s shot onto paper, but there’s nothing really there. It’s just suggestions and the mind creates images and stories. The brain creates the images.
You’ve known some of the photographers whose works you’ve collected. What’s something interesting that they’ve said about the medium?
There was a wonderful story that Herb [Ritts] told me about [photographer] Helmut Newton. He was talking to Herb about the camera and he said, “You know, the image is not in the camera.” And then he pointed to his head and his heart and said, “It’s here.”
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