{"id":6669,"date":"2016-07-01T14:02:22","date_gmt":"2016-07-01T19:02:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/july-august-2016-in-profile\/"},"modified":"2023-02-12T14:47:00","modified_gmt":"2023-02-12T19:47:00","slug":"july-august-2016-in-profile","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/in-profile\/july-august-2016-in-profile\/","title":{"rendered":"Stephen Daiter"},"content":{"rendered":"

Expertise is crucial in the photo world, but who possesses definitive knowledge, and how do you find those people? Stephen Daiter<\/a><\/span> of Chicago, who\u2019s been in the business for 25 years, will assert that he can\u2019t know everything<\/i> about 20th-century documentary or experimental photography (two of his specialties) \u2013 no one can. Yet, only a handful of dealers could give you the thread of information you need to understand the value and history of just such a print. \u201cOur path [at the gallery] starts from the 20th century, and we try to draw a line that connects the work of the \u201820s and \u201830s to the work of the \u201860s and \u201870s and the work that\u2019s being done now,\u201d says Daiter. \u201cFor instance, you can see the foundations of Gary Schneider\u2019s work in Moholy-Nagy (not to mention Helmar Lerski); you look at Eugene Richards and you see his connection to Eugene Smith; and Alex Webb\u2019s imagery added an essential new dimension, color, to Cartier-Bresson\u2019s visual vocabulary of decisive moments and elemental geometry. I don\u2019t have a photographic memory at all,\u201d Daiter says, \u201cbut when the information comes in, a lot of it stays.\u201d<\/p>\n

Daiter, 63, was born and raised in Philadelphia to a Canadian-Jewish father \u2013 a doctor \u2013 and a German-Catholic mother. The forward-thinking, socially concerned couple raised Daiter and his two siblings as Quakers \u2013 they attended Friends schools throughout the 1960s and into the \u201870s and went to civil rights demonstrations and protest lines to boot. Daiter attended several colleges, ultimately majoring in sociology at Bucknell. He went to the University of Chicago for graduate school, where he studied human development and immersed himself in a doctoral dissertation on \u201cuncertainty in the lives of young adults who have serious illnesses.\u201d He taught full time at Northwestern and amassed some 600 hours of field interviews with his subjects, often in far-flung locations. When he arrived early for his appointments, he\u2019d visit bookstores and antique shops, where he began to spot photo books of note that others had passed by. \u201cI regularly saw books like Danny Lyon\u2019s Bikeriders<\/i> and bought them, initially because I liked them, later realizing I could supply them to people who were really interested in this work.\u201d He found prints by the likes of Lewis Hine, Clarence John Laughlin, and Walker Evans, and publications by people like Marion Palfi (whose Suffer Little Children<\/i> is still one of his favorites). In 1991, Daiter went into business for himself full time.<\/p>\n

His gallery opened to the public in 1997, and specialties include the New Bauhaus\/Institute of Design (Moholy-Nagy, Kepes, Callahan, and Siskind) and the Photo League. Daiter\u2019s contemporary stable fits seamlessly into the mix. On view through July 30, Jay King: Good for Chicago<\/i> features street work by the septuagenarian photographer, and a show by gallery artist Dawoud Bey is planned for the fall. \u201cBey does deep, interesting projects,\u201d says Daiter, mentioning The Birmingham Project<\/i>, in which Bey researched and depicted the faces of local children who would be the same age of the children who died during the bombing of the city\u2019s 16th Street Baptist Church in 1963 and other violent acts of that day, \u201cas well as adults the same age those children would be today \u2013 had they lived,\u201d says Daiter. \u201cYou feel the absence of people; they\u2019re there, because they\u2019re not there.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Expertise is crucial in the photo world, but who possesses definitive knowledge, and how do you find those people? Stephen Daiter of Chicago, who\u2019s been in the business for 25 years, will assert that he can\u2019t know everything about 20th-century documentary or experimental photography (two of his specialties) \u2013 no one can. Yet, only a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":3476,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_seopress_robots_primary_cat":"none","_seopress_titles_title":"","_seopress_titles_desc":"","_seopress_robots_index":"","_relevanssi_hide_post":"","_relevanssi_hide_content":"","_relevanssi_pin_for_all":"","_relevanssi_pin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_unpin_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_keywords":"","_relevanssi_related_include_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_exclude_ids":"","_relevanssi_related_no_append":"","_relevanssi_related_not_related":"","_relevanssi_related_posts":"6926,6319,7374,7291,22967,6717,7005,6203,6417,6523,6612,6833","_relevanssi_noindex_reason":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[13],"tags":[],"issues":[91],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6669"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6669"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6669\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3476"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6669"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6669"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6669"},{"taxonomy":"issues","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/photographmag.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/issues?post=6669"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}