Metro Photos was identified for independence and curatorial care—deep dedication quite than deep pockets. That strategy labored for 4 many years. Based in New York by two ladies who went to junior-high college collectively in Los Angeles, the gallery was at all times a single area: first in Soho, then in Chelsea, with a short-lived department in East Hampton.
“Everyone is making an attempt to create a number of outposts, they usually simply stayed in New York and made it work,” says Sophie Chahinian, who’s making Photos of Photos: The Metro Years, a function documentary concerning the gallery that represented many artists related to the Photos Era group—together with Louise Lawler, Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo and Walter Robinson. “It’s form of miraculous. There’s some sense to it, and likewise some magic,” Chahinian says.
In 1980, Janelle Reiring left Leo Castelli Gallery to discovered Metro Photos with Helene Winer, who on the time was the director of the Decrease Manhattan nonprofit Artists House.
“They had been integrity-driven, they had been pushed by their artists, they had been pushed by their programme, they usually didn’t actually pay a number of consideration to the factor that galleries take note of proper now, which is mainly the underside line,” Chahinian says.
With a mortgage from her household, Winer purchased the gallery’s first residence in Soho. “It was about $12,000. These had been the times,” she says. “The story of how the artwork world has modified within the 40-some years that we had been open is extra fascinating than the gallery per se. It was so small. There have been solely perhaps 5 galleries exhibiting new younger artists. It’s unbelievable.”
“It was a clubhouse,” says Robert Longo, Chahinian’s husband. Longo had relocated from Buffalo when he and his then-partner Cindy Sherman joined the gallery, which represented a few of his pals and different artists.
Longo recollects: “I trusted them fully. I feel ladies artwork sellers are held to the next customary. I by no means had any enterprise issues with them, ever. They had been tremendous sincere, they usually had been extremely supportive.” Longo now reveals with Tempo Gallery and with Thaddaeus Ropac in Europe. Sherman is represented by Hauser & Wirth.
A time of various expectations
Issues weren’t at all times straightforward within the early days at Metro Photos, not even for Sherman. “Individuals didn’t perceive that she was an artist utilizing pictures,” Longo says. “You couldn’t fucking give these film stills away at first. They had been being bought for $50.” In December 1995, Metro Photos bought an entire set of Sherman’s Untitled Movie Stills (1977–80) to the Museum of Fashionable Artwork in New York for $1m, averaging $14,492 per print; editions from the sequence now routinely promote for greater than ten instances that at public sale.
Metro Photos got here up at a time when artists approached their work and the market with completely different expectations. “Cindy and I, we by no means thought we had been going to make any cash being artists, by no means,” Longo says. “We thought we’d perhaps get a stipend. Getting cash was by no means on the menu.”
Or virtually by no means. “I keep in mind one time once I came upon that Julian Schnabel’s work was promoting for greater than mine and I bought very upset about it,” Longo recollects. “I went to the gallery and stated, ‘I’m going to fucking kill myself.’ And Janelle stated to me, ‘It received’t work. They’ll simply overlook you.’ And I realised, when she stated that, it gave me this motivation to outlive.”
Reiring, recalling that change, provides: “I simply stated, ‘You haven’t accomplished sufficient work but to be well-known.’” Artists, Winer says, “have a number of needs, and hopes, and ups and downs. And so they watch one another’s careers carefully.” That a lot has not modified within the 45 years since Metro Photos opened its doorways.
The market by which Metro Photos thrived was reworked not by artists however by mega-galleries, which made the mannequin of a curated gallery run by two folks in a single metropolis a enterprise anachronism going through extinction.
“After all, everyone cherished us after we introduced that we had been closing,” Reiring says. Each Reiring and Winer moved again to Los Angeles after shutting the gallery in 2021.
“It’s simply concerning the aggressive setting and what you must do to outlive as a gallery now,” Winer says. “Concerning the early years, I can get nostalgic, however it’s so way back it looks as if studying a ebook about any person’s previous gallery.”
Or like watching a documentary. Chahinian expects to complete Photos of Photos in early 2026.
