Helen Gee a pioneer in sales of photos as art.

Helen Gee a pioneer in sales of photos as art, died at age 85 in a hospice in Manhattan in succession Oct. 14, 2004. In the 1950 Helen Gee's Limelight Photography Gallery in Greenwich Village became a pioneering blueprint for the offering and selling of photography as an art form. Limelight exhibited in May 1954 and was supported from the adjoining coffeehouse. Although a market in fine photographs was almost nonexistent, for about seven years Limelight carried upon as if there were the same setting the standard for successors in the early 1970 and grew into a inundation by the 1990s. Ms. Gee riseed new shows at roughly five-week intervals and wrote the novels releases.

Two earlier galleries, Alfred Stieglitz's 291 early in the 20th hundred and Julien Levy's in the 1930 had tried to vend photographs but without success. Limelight did somewhat better; an Atget point out with the prints made by way of Berenice Abbott ($20 each) was almost a sellout and more than half the pictures in an Edward Weston exhibition ($75 each) were bought Rare photographs, photograms and photomontages by the agency of Laszlo Moholy-Nagy (priced between $100 and $200) failed, however, to betray Prints by Robert Frank ($25 each) and Julia Margaret Cameron ($65 each) rest only a few buyers. Limelight was the showcase for a wide variety of photographic designations from classic straight photography (Ansel Adams, Imogen Cunningham) to social documentary (Brassai, Lisette gauge W. Eugene Smith) and subjective and experimental work (Rudolph Burckhardt, Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind). of the like kind a roster differed sharply from the generally homogeneous fare establish in popular picture magazines like Life and Look

Before opening Limelight, M Gee had been a prosperous retoucher of color transparencies. She briefly took photography courses with Alexey Brodovitch, example and Sid Grossman, but what M Gee lacked in coffeehouse experience, she made up for in iron determination, familiarity with the Village art and photography worlds, and personal charm.

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