Long Island Books: At The Limelight

"Limelight"

A Memoir

Helen Gee

University of New Mexico Press

$50 cloth;, $19.95 paperback

Way back in the 1950s, when I was young, poor, and good-looking, I worked for a New York photographic agency called Rapho-Guillumette. It was run by a diminutive Hungarian named Charles Rado, whose soft-spoken good manners and many facial tics hid a steely, tortured, and obsessive nature.

But he adored photography and his agency's roster and photographer-friends included names such as Brassai, Robert Doisneau, Bill Brandt, Man Ray, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Sabine Weiss, Sanford Roth, Fred Lyon, and Ken Heyman, among many others.

Working at Rapho-Guillumette was my photographic apprenticeship. Handling what are today considered masterpieces on a daily basis for some six years, and meeting the agency's photographers gave me a love of and insight into the medium that has only increased and deepened with time.

Pretty Blonde

Another and equally seminal apprenticeship in those years was Limelight, the first ever photographic gallery and coffeehouse in New York.

Limelight, in the early '50s, was something of a phenomenon - a phenomenon wrought by a slim, extremely pretty young blonde, mysteriously named Helen Gee.

Not only did Helen Gee stage ongoing photographic shows of real substance and artistry, but she veritably helped in putting photography as an art form firmly on the map.

Beyond Snapshots

Her extraordinary sensitivity and keen judgment offered a public deeply disdainful of photography the opportunity of seeing works that went way beyond the mere recording of mundane, snapshot images.

Here were works of genuine personal expression - deeply felt records of individual visions produced with passion and dedication. Her exhibits consisted of names that have long since entered the canon of the "greats": Robert Frank, Berenice Abbott, Ansel Adams, W. Eugene Smith, Paul Strand, Edward Weston, Minor White, Dan Weiner, Elliott Erwitt, Brassai, Robert Doiseneau, Sabine Weiss, Alvarez Bravo, Harry Callahan, Imogene Cunningham, Lisette Model, Gordon Parks, as well as already established masters such as Alfred Stieglitz and the earlier Julia Margaret Cameron (her closing exhibit in 1961).

Trendy Clubs

But Limelight was more. Located in the heart of Greenwich Village, the place was today's equivalent to one of the city's chic-est and trendiest clubs or nightspots.

It was a large, well-lit space consisting of many tables, room to walk around in, and, toward the rear, a well-designed gallery where people could look at the photographs and mingle. It was really more than a coffeehouse, serving real food deliciously prepared by Fong, the Limelight's Chinese chef.

In short, it was unique.

Comforting Presence

At the time living on nearby Bleecker Street, my wife, Jane, and I visited Limelight countless times. Often we'd see Helen Gee sipping coffee at one of the tables and usually talking (most often listening) to one photographer or another.

She was a cool and comforting presence in what was usually quite a mob scene. Indeed, Limelight was the quickly acknowledged meeting place of the city's photographic community, which would include such "important" personages as Edward Steichen, the director of the Museum of Modern Art's photography department and Jacob Deschin, at the time the photography critic of The New York Times.

But then, artists and personalities of every persuasion could be seen and wanted to be seen at Limelight - it was the "in" place to be.

Deepest Love

The woman behind it all was neither wealthy nor well connected when she opened Limelight. Married to a young, talented, and troubled Chinese painter, Yun Gee, and the mother of their daughter, Li-Lan, Helen Gee held various jobs in the city to help support the family.

Eventually she became a re-toucher of color transparencies, working for major magazines and earning enough money to venture into the highly precarious waters of storefront rentals and enterprises.

It had been her deepest love of photography that drove her to it, and "Limelight" is her account of how it all happened, how it endured, and how it all ended.

Slow Rise

Told with admirable simplicity (Ms. Gee's prose is mercifully devoid of photo-jargon), the story of her venture, at once pioneering and poignant, is also the story of the slow rise of American photography as an activity meriting the greatest attention and respect.

In her quest to make this happen, Helen Gee encountered endless setbacks, many financial crises, dealings with the underworld, and coping with the vagaries of "artistic" temperaments.

In her tale, candid as well as informative, she offers wonderful portraits of the photographers she championed - the young, disheveled, unpredictable Robert Frank, the aging and rather lecherous Steichen, the "suicidal" Eugene Smith, the stubborn and outrageous Lisette Model, the impossibly messy and vociferous Weegee.

Most important, in the telling, Helen Gee reveals a moment in the history of photography that saw some of the country's most gifted artists subsisting on practically no money at all - where a print sold at Limelight might fetch the grand sum of $25 or less - and where even showing a few prints in a group show constituted a major breakthrough.

Gifted Artists

It took courage and it took a kind of daredevil spunkiness that Ms. Gee possessed in abundance to build a serious and genuine home for photography.

But build it she did, and some of the greatest names in photography owe her a debt - a debt that eventually paid off and brought glory to the art form and, one hopes, to Helen Gee herself.

John Gruen is a writer and photographer who divides his time between Water Mill and New York City.