Lens Appeal

It is ironic that Daniel Wolf's brainchild, the exhibition celebrating photography's 150th anniversary which comes from London's Royal Academy to Houston's Museum of Fine Arts this month, was the indirect product of his dissatisfaction with the field. Wolf, thirty-three, founded a gallery in New York in 1977, selling the work of John Coplans, Eliot Porter, and Arnold Newman, to name only a few. In the mid-eighties, for reasons he still doesn't comprehend, the climate changed. "I felt the response of the audience was getting less and less," he says. "The exhibitions I was doing were not getting reviewed. The heat was going into Cindy Sherman, the Starn Twins. Energy in has to equal energy out." He left with quite a bang, though, putting together the Getty Museum's vast collection by selling it his stock and fifteen other collections.

The current gargantuan exhibition was put together, with Wolf as chief selector, in his Upper East Side apartment, once the music room at the defunct Finch College. There was give-and-take; work he would like to have seen in the show is absent, and fashion and war photographs, both of which the Royal Academy folks decried as "fake," are there, at his insistence. The show now includes four hundred photographs by more than eighty-five photographers. What's next? "I've been asked to do another show, for Tokyo," Wolf says. Then, with a slightly abashed air, he adds that he's been "thinking of going back into some form of dealing."

ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST