Retired St. Petersburg businessman Terry Loebel spent five years collecting vintage black and white photos intending to give them to the Museum of Fine Arts.
Lewis Hine, Three Riveters, Empire State Building, 1931, vintage gelatin silver print.
ST. PETERSBURG - Today is about giving thanks. I, like most of you, have many personal blessings to count. But I also have a lot of thanks to give for institutional blessings, the kind that affects us all. I'm talking about the philanthropic impulse, the gesture that benefits people far beyond family and friends, maybe extending long after the giver becomes a dim memory.
I invite you, the next time you visit a museum, to look at the wall cards accompanying the works. They tell you how each piece of art came into a collection - through purchases often, but mostly as gifts. Gifts. Sure, there are tax advantages and, depending on the importance of the art, a lot of stroking from interested parties. But you can't deny the good will of someone who could realize a significant cash windfall by selling a work or enjoy a beautiful painting or sculpture 24/7 at home but instead gives it up so a lot of people can share it.
We have many examples of such generosity at local museums. One of the more recent is the gift of 32 photographs to the Museum of Fine Arts by Terry Loebel and his family. Loebel assembled the collection, which includes exceptionally choice vintage prints, in five years with the intention from the start of giving it away.
"Most of the things I do aren't for the arts," he said. "But when we moved downtown from the beach, I got to know this museum. I think it's a fantastic place, and I wanted to do something for it."
Loebel, 64, who retired after the lucrative sale of his company, Val-Pak, in 1986, divides his time, with his wife, among St. Petersburg and homes in California. Their two adult children live in Florida.
He said he has always been interested in black and white photography and was especially interested in the series taken by Lewis Hine during construction of the Empire State Building.
"Six years ago, when I had the opportunity to purchase one of them, I jumped," he said. He became an avid reader of the genre and says he would typically spend 30 hours a week learning about it and about auction prices "so I didn't get taken in buying them."
He was interested in early 20th century photography and the directions taken within the medium during those decades. No color, no computer manipulations. Here is photography at its most sincere and immediate. The group is not large enough to be considered representative, but the variety of approaches conveys the sense of excitement shared by several generations of photographers for the medium's vast potential and possibilities.
The two oldest examples are an 1890s tintype of Butch Cassidy and an albumen print from 1855 by Farnham Maxwell Lyte of a French chateau. They act as historical markers, giving us a sense of beginnings and the early use of photography for commercial purposes - as documents of people and places. That limited vision of the medium did not last long, fueled by technical advances and the wonky predilection of most photographers to experiment.
As seen by the prints lining the small gallery walls, within two decades the ideas began tumbling out. Portraits of a young Charlie Chaplin in 1925 by Edward Steichen and of Jean Cocteau in 1924 by his friend Man Ray show both men's recognition that photography, like painting, could record more than physical features, could capture in a new way the elusive and unique personality of the sitter.
The way practitioners photographed landscapes revealed as much about how they felt toward their subject as the actual topography. Compare the cerebral beach, all angles and slices of light and shadow, of Brett Weston (son of Edward) with the poetic scene by Henri Cartier-Bresson of trees soaring over a flat French countryside, seeming to shelter a road as it curves into the distance.
Margaret Bourke-White's famous detachment and her admiration for objects of industry - not those who create them - is clear in her 1932 portrait of a Sikorsky airplane. Hine, a year earlier in the Empire State Building series, gives heroic status to the laborers rather than the building in Three Riveters.
And views of New York could not be more different that Berenice Abbott's famous El, 2nd and 3rd Avenue Lines (1938), formal, informational and compositionally complex, and Drahomir Joseph Ruzicka's Penn Station (1928), which renders the gritty station as a beautiful place of mystery.
But the documentary value of photography is given its due, too, especially its effectiveness in recording war. In Robert Capa's Soldier Replaces Casuality, Leipzig (1945), we see three soldiers occupying a well-appointed room. One is at a desk. Another is ignored and sprawled on the balcony, partially hidden by a French door, a pool of his blood seeping toward an oriental rug. The third soldier has grabbed the machine gun, perched on a finely wrought iron balcony. The juxtaposition of the interior's normalcy with the drama and death occurring in it has the finely calibrated nuance of Brueghel's Fall of Icarus and the chilling, horrific effect of Goya's evocations of battle. More, it has an immediacy, a sense of veracity as well as moral truth a painting never could.
Notably missing is Ansel Adams.
"I didn't feel he made the grade," Loebel said. "I felt his work was so commercial and didn't like that he altered some of his prints in the darkroom."
The most recent work is O. Winston Link's Hotshot Eastbound, Iager, West Virginia, from 1957. Link was not unlike Adams in the studied look of his photographs, which required elaborate lighting and a wait that could last hours before the perfect shot presented itself. In this photo, a steam-engine train barrels past a drive-in movie theater, where, in the foreground, a couple sits in a convertible watching the film. It has the kind of layered images we assume have been collaged digitally. In this vintage print we see all that photography has evolved from and get a hint at where it might go. Like that train, it seems more destiny than destination.
"Through the Lens of the Masters: The Loebel Family Donation of Photographs" is at the Museum of Fine Arts, 255 Beach Drive NE, St. Petersburg, through Dec. 5. Museum hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesday through Saturday and 1 to 5 p.m. Sunday. Admission is $8 adults, $7 seniors and $4 students. (727) 896-2667.
