Metro Photos was identified for independence and curatorial care—deep dedication moderately than deep pockets. That strategy labored for 4 a long time. Based in New York by two ladies who went to junior-high faculty collectively in Los Angeles, the gallery was all the time 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 whole lot of consideration to the factor that galleries take note of proper now, which is principally the underside line,” Chahinian says.
With a mortgage from her household, Winer purchased the gallery’s first house 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 attention-grabbing than the gallery per se. It was so small. There have been solely possibly 5 galleries displaying 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 mates and different artists.
Longo recollects: “I trusted them fully. I believe ladies artwork sellers are held to a better 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 exhibits with Tempo Gallery and with Thaddaeus Ropac in Europe. Sherman is represented by Hauser & Wirth.
A time of various expectations
Issues weren’t all the time simple within the early days at Metro Photos, not even for Sherman. “Folks didn’t perceive that she was an artist utilizing images,” Longo says. “You couldn’t fucking give these film stills away at first. They had been being offered for $50.” In December 1995, Metro Photos offered 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 totally 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 possibly get a stipend. Being profitable was by no means on the menu.”
Or virtually by no means. “I bear in mind one time after 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 mentioned, ‘I’m going to fucking kill myself.’ And Janelle mentioned to me, ‘It received’t work. They’ll simply overlook you.’ And I realised, when she mentioned that, it gave me this motivation to outlive.”
Reiring, recalling that change, provides: “I simply mentioned, ‘You haven’t executed sufficient work but to be well-known.’” Artists, Winer says, “have numerous needs, and hopes, and ups and downs. And so they watch one another’s careers intently.” 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 dealing with extinction.
“After all, all people liked 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 it’s important to do to outlive as a gallery now,” Winer says. “In regards to the early years, I can get nostalgic, however it’s so way back it looks like studying a ebook about any individual’s outdated gallery.”
Or like watching a documentary. Chahinian expects to complete Photos of Photos in early 2026.
