This weekend, the MIA opens a must-see exhibition for photography fans: 31 Years: Gifts from Martin Weinstein, featuring a good chunk of the more than 500 photographs given to the MIA over the decades by the former trial attorney and current gallery owner, including greats like August Sander, Josef Ruzicka, W. Eugene Smith, and his good friend Alec Soth. Many of the labels include commentary from Weinstein himself, whose scrappy Brooklyn upbringing comes through. Here, in a sneak preview, is his explanation behind Soth’s portrait above, which earned him his enviable nickname:
Among the other photographs given to the MIA by Martin Weinstein, this quirky classic by Elliott Erwitt.
I was preparing to do a show that had taken me about three years to put together. It was called The Pyramids: 150 years of Photographic Fascination. And I noticed that every afternoon when I returned home in the summer in July and June, there was a pyramidal shape of sunlight that occurred on the shingles of my garage. I said to Alec, “You know, there is a great pyramid image that needs to be taken. It’s this image that appears on the peeling paint of my garage.” Several weeks later, [my wife] Lora and I went out shopping one Sunday for groceries. We came back and there’s Alec and his camera all set up, blocking the driveway. He says, “You should be in this picture.” We had a five-minute battle over that, and I finally said O.K.
Another classic image in the exhibition: “Homeless Damm Family in Their Car, Los Angeles, California,” by Mary Ellen Mark.
We hung it in the show close to the window, facing the street. Well, a fellow called to say he was going to be reviewing the show for some paper and would stop by before we closed. We waited till five, five-thirty, and he never showed up. And then about two weeks later, someone sent us a copy of the article, in which he said he’d obviously not gotten into the gallery because it was closed, and he’d peered in through a window, and the thing that he could see most easily was the picture of me. So he wrote about the pyramid show and said his favorite image is of this old guy who looks like an American pharaoh. And my wife has called me the American Pharaoh for the last decade because of that.