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Douglas Marshall

BY Sarah Schmerler, April 19, 2019

It’s a delicate business, taking the dealing and promotion of fine-art photography into the 21st century. You need to have a good understanding of technology and a deep respect for the aesthetic and material roots of the medium, not to mention excellent time-management skills. Los Angeles-based dealer Douglas Marshall has just the right touch. “I’m an obsessive organizer, and database and exhibition manager,” he says. “I’m that person who connects the dots, who makes an idea come to life.”

The year is young, but Marshall Contemporary, the private photography consulting business he will continue to run in his “spare time” is already meshing smoothly with the post he assumed in 2018: director of Galerie XII, the new West Coast branch of the high-end gallery with locations in Paris and Shanghai. The exhibition opening March 16 will fuse avant-garde classical music and photography in large-format prints of theater and opera interiors shot around the world by 66-year-old photographer Klaus Frahm. The show opens the same day Frahm’s son, pianist Nils Frahm, debuts at L.A.’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. Marshall has timed it so that guests can attend the opening first and make it to the concert later that night. He’s even picked out LPs to play in the gallery. “It’s important that a show be more than framed pictures on the wall,” he says.

Marshall, 32, grew up in the Dallas suburb of Mesquite, Texas. His father, an informationtechnology specialist, and mother, a school administrator, were supportive of his interest in taking photographs, though he was largely self taught. Things came together at the University of Texas, Austin, where he studied photography under Lawrence McFarland, Nowlin Professor in Photography. After getting his B.A., he remained in Austin for another three years.

He helped organize the lecture series at the nonprofit Austin Center for Photography, and he held down an internship at the Creative Research Lab, all while supporting himself with a day job at Precision Camera as well as with his own freelance photography. “After a while, I realized that though I loved Austin, I was going to have to leave it,” he says, adding, “I was much better at gallery work than I was at being a professional photographer.” He moved to L .A. in 2011 and got a job as a gallery assistant at the contemporary art gallery Kayne Griffin Corcoran. In 2012 he went to work for Peter Fetterman Gallery, first as a registrar, then as assistant director. “Peter didn’t care about what degrees you had,” he recalls. “Are you going to work hard? Are you passionate?” Eight months later, at the age of 26, Marshall was promoted to director. He estimates he organized about 50 shows and art fairs before he left Fetterman in 2017, but if he had to pick a favorite it would be a small group show called Unseen: Silhouettes and Shadows, for the way it evinced his own personal aesthetic. In future, look for Marshall to feature unsettling-yet-meditative landscapes by Spanish duo Albarrán Cabrera and Canadian Jakob de Boer. “I get accused of liking moody, dark, sad things,” he says, “but it’s much closer to the Japanese concept of mono no aware – appreciation for the ephemeral. I like photographic images that are open ended, that allow viewers to make up their own minds.”