Betsy Evans Hunt and International Acclaimed Photographer Todd Webb on Building a Legacy

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle and you are listening to or watching Radio Maine today. It is my very special pleasure to have in the studio with me a woman who spent time with one of, I would say, the icons of American photography, arguably. This is Betsy Evans Hunt. Thanks for coming in today.

Betsy Evans Hunt: Thanks. Happy to be here.

Lisa Belisle: I don't want to minimize what you also did over the course of your own career, but you also studied photography. You also owned a gallery. You did a lot of things in this field before you even met Todd.

Betsy Evans Hunt: Yes, I did. I wrote my thesis on Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe, and so it was so funny to meet Todd years later, who was friends with them. But I also had a stint, sort of a wild stint in New York where I worked for Robert Mapplethorpe. I managed his studio in the 1980s and met a lot of the players during that time in terms of the people involved with the photography business.

Lisa Belisle: For those people who might be, maybe weren't alive during the eighties, let's just say, tell me about the Robert Mapplethorpe experience, because he was quite controversial at the time.

Betsy Evans Hunt: He was. He was just transitioning into being sort of accepted in society. He had done a series of work which was underground, sort of S and M gay portraits and that sort of thing. And then he was transitioning into doing portraits. He did a body of work on a woman bodybuilder named Lisa Lyon, and he also did black male nudes, which were more sculptural. But he did a lot of stuff for Interview Magazine. And so I was sort of hired to be his gal Friday. I would greet people and serve them coffee. It was so embarrassing because it was instant coffee that we served them back then. That was fun. It was for about two years, and it was in the early 1980s, and I was still sort of in my early-mid twenties and not really sure what I was up to. So I only did it for about two years. But it was so much fun. He was a character for sure, but he was just sort of taking off into the next realm of acceptability and then fame, really. So it was great.

Lisa Belisle: It's interesting to think about if he had been born, say 20 years later, if this had happened, that experience you're describing, if that had happened maybe 30 years later. I feel like lately there's been a lot more acceptance of this type of work that you're describing, and a lot more acceptance of just a broad variety of lives.

Betsy Evans Hunt: It's really true. And, sadly, he died of AIDS, and so you think about the wonderful treatments that are available now. He was on the forefront of things for sure, and he always really did want to be famous. He was not shy about saying that. He sort of wanted to fashion himself after Andy Warhol, which is interesting. It was a great experience for me. But then I moved to the Virgin Islands and lived with my boyfriend on a boat for a couple years. And then I came back and I worked at the Addison Gallery in Andover, which is a wonderful small museum of American art. And I cataloged their collection. And then I did a program at Sotheby's, and then I ended up getting up here to work in the antiques business. And that was fraught with all sorts of things. And so I ended up opening my gallery here in 1989.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me about your own photography.

Betsy Evans Hunt: I'm not a photographer.

Lisa Belisle: Oh, okay. So how did you get interested in this field then?

Betsy Evans Hunt: I was an art history major, and so I just was really interested in the history of photography. When I did my thesis on Alfred Stieglitz, who was sort of the premier 20th century American photographer, I got my first job in a gallery in San Francisco, which was a photography gallery. And that was in the late 1970s, and so that was when it was just all taking off. People like Graham Nash from Crosby, Stills and Nash were collecting. All these fancy, fun people would come in and buy things. And so I got to know all sorts of people. So that's what enabled me, when I got back to Maine, all the people I'd known 10 years before had all of a sudden gotten their places and were having their own galleries. And so I was able to really get a lot of really good work because of those connections. I mostly got things on consignment, so I didn't have a huge outlay, didn't make great margins, but I was able to get great stuff like Eliot Porter and Ansel Adams and that kind of stuff. So it was fun.

Lisa Belisle: I happen to know, from just being a fly on the wall over at the Portland Art Gallery, that selling photography is very different than selling fine art, let's just say. It's a different market. It's a different kind of structure. You're selling prints, you're not selling original work. I mean, it's original, but it's all going to be a copy of something, right? So tell me about that experience.

Betsy Evans Hunt: Well, it's interesting, because now photographers are really trying to integrate themselves into either doing more unique works or very limited editions. And many photographers enjoy showing at galleries that have painting and sculpture and that sort of thing. But yes, it's sort of an artificial thing, to be honest. People like Ansel Adams, and Todd in the old days. Ansel Adams's most famous picture was Moonrise, Hernandez, and there are probably at least a thousand of those that exist. And so there's really no rhyme or reason to the market, because those can sell from 50 to 150 or $200,000 per print. So it's sort of a supply and demand, because it's such a popular image. But then when I got involved with Todd, I had a lot of beautiful vintage work, which was either unique. So he was working large format, so eight by ten negative, five by seven negative. So a contact print would be that size, and those might be one or two or three images that he did over the years. But then when I started working with him and we printed some larger work, we started limiting the edition. So it's a way of assuring the collector that there aren't a thousand of them around. Although people who collect it, that's what I say, it's a contradiction, but it's a way to make sure that the value of the piece holds. So we did editions of 10 and 15, that sort of thing, but we never printed them all. And so I have the ability to do them posthumously up until whatever number exists. But it's a complicated market. If the photographer printed it themselves and signed it themselves, and then there's also a thing between vintage and modern in photography. People tend to, collectors tend to, really serious collectors go for vintage work, which is considered to be maybe closer to the artist's conception, taken and printed at the same time it was taken, that kind of thing.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I enjoy hearing about this. Having talked to Nina Fuller and subsequently buying one of her pieces and watching that whole process, the large format, as you say, it's very different than, oh, I'm just going to send this off to Shutterfly and something's going to come back and I'm going to stick it on my desk at work.

Betsy Evans Hunt: Yes. And understanding someone, I mean, Nina is fabulous. I've known her for a long time. But someone like Todd, who was a completely different generation, he was born in 1905 and was taking pictures. He came to photography later in his career, actually. He was in his mid-late thirties before he started, but he was working, as I mentioned, with an eight by ten camera, or a five by seven camera. So any given day he was walking around town, first of all, with this very cumbersome thing and a tripod. And also probably only as many as maybe ten pieces of film, maybe only five, depending on how much money he had. So he had to really pick and choose time of day, location. He couldn't just go take a million pictures and then choose one. Do you know what I mean? And so it's a whole different psyche, which is pretty cool, I think.

Lisa Belisle: I remember reading, in I See a City, that one of the challenges that he had there was you either kind of decided that a car was going to be in the shot or a car wasn't going to be in the shot, right? And that kind of makes sense now that you're telling me, if he's bringing a tripod around and setting it up, that you kind of, that's a big decision. And there's a lot of variables that you can't really control for, I would think, in that sort of photography.

Betsy Evans Hunt: Yes. Well, you're speaking of, he's speaking about this panel, which is Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th, taken in 1948. And he did it on a Sunday morning because he thought there'd be less traffic, which he was right about. And he marked off with chalk on the opposite side of the street the eight different pictures he wanted to take. And then he stood and took one picture and then stood and took another picture. But he had to wait, and he got it. There are some cars that are parked, but he doesn't have any moving cars in it. So it's luck, timing, smarts.

Lisa Belisle: Which is still a thing even in today's photography, because I know, having worked with people who are now even doing digital work, they're always paying attention to what's going on with the light, what's going on with the weather. And so it's a little, again, different from other types of visual art, where perhaps you're working from a photograph or perhaps you're doing plein air, but there's a little bit more stasis that you're dealing with, perhaps.

Betsy Evans Hunt: Yes. It's just interesting, I think. Absolutely. And Todd just fell in love with it. He was working for Chrysler in the late thirties and he was a member of the Chrysler Camera Club. And they somehow wrangled Ansel Adams to come and give them a workshop. And it was a ten-day workshop. And up until that point it had just been an avocation at photography, but then after that it was just something he had to do. He was just smitten, bitten by the bug. And he writes in his journal, I have a journal of his 1300 pages long from 1946 to 1976, but any given month he might have only literally $5 and he just wanted, he had to continue. So I think it's a passion, as all artists, but it was certainly a passion for Todd.

Lisa Belisle: In one of the books there's a story about his lost work, and about how you actually went and found his work that had been gone for a very long time, and you were able to recover it. I'd like you to tell us about that.

Betsy Evans Hunt: Oh, such an incredible story. So when I met Todd in 1989, I had certainly heard of him, and I said, why don't you have gallery representation? And he said, well, I had a very difficult situation with a gallery in the 1970s. This fellow promised to buy basically my whole collection for a certain amount of money, and then he only paid me about a third of it, and then sort of absconded with most of it. And so Todd just had a terrible taste in his mouth about dealing with photography. And he also grew up very simply. He was a Quaker. He wasn't really a practicing Quaker as an adult, but that was his background. And so they lived very simply, but well. So time went on and I kept on saying, Todd, don't you want to go after these guys? And he said, nope, nope, nope. It just wasn't in his nature. So he died. And then I sort of inherited that reluctance. I didn't ever want to. But then I finally had the contract to do the show at the Museum of the City of New York in 2017. And I had seen stuff come up online, eBay and that sort of thing, that were not necessarily the best prints and selling for way under market value. And I kind of knew where to look. I thought, I've got to figure out where this stuff is, because all of a sudden Todd's name is going to be raised up a little bit more and I don't want this stuff sort of hanging around out there. So I found this person. He lived in Berkeley. He had bought this stuff from the original fellow, he and two other guys. So this crazy consortium of these three guys in Berkeley bought most of the work. So the work was originally sold in '76 and they bought it in '81. And weirdly enough, I had actually met this fellow when I worked for the gallery in San Francisco in the late 1970s. So off we go to his bungalow in Berkeley. And he's a bit of a hoarder, like quite a hoarder. And so he made me take off my shoes, but then I walked through these stacks of stuff, and he walks me up to a bedroom where he had splayed out mostly the O'Keeffe photographs, and there were quite a number of them, and they were fantastic. I was like, wow, this is amazing. I said, is this it? He said, oh no, there's more. So off we go to Oakland, California, and on the hills of Oakland met this other fellow. So these guys are now in their mid-seventies, this is in 2016. And they say, well, come downstairs. And in this basement there were five steamer trunks with padlocks on them, and thankfully a dry basement. We opened them up and it was just mind-blowing, because there were probably 7,000 items in there. Negatives, prints, journals, ephemera, basically the sum total of Todd's life. And so I understand why he never really wanted to talk about it. And so it took me two or three trips to actually go and sort of quantify the whole thing. I talked to some lawyers about maybe suing these guys and they just said, you catch more flies with honey than vinegar, and Todd wouldn't have wanted me to do that anyway. So we worked out a deal where I was able to get the work back, because they had known Todd and they wanted to do the right thing. They were just a little bit hapless. I said, what are you going to do with all this? And Todd, at a certain point, had gotten some of this stuff back. And so I'd inherited what he had, which was also a fantastic group of things. So we got the five trunks across the country and back, and now we've been cataloging it all since. And so we made some incredible discoveries, one of which is the Africa work.

Lisa Belisle: Yes. I was really interested to read this, because this Africa work, well, or maybe all of it, wasn't it commissioned?

Betsy Evans Hunt: Yes, by the UN. So he was meant to go to Africa. He did go to Africa to photograph sort of emerging nations and technologies and that sort of thing. And so I had known about the trip, we'd spoken about it, but I had no idea. I'd only ever seen maybe two or three black and white prints that he had. And so when we found in the trunks all these negatives, and they're color, and thank God they were in good shape. And so, first of all, color, which I never saw any color work by Todd before this time, and it's square format, which is different for him. So it was this whole crazy discovery. And then I brought the stuff home and I showed it initially to a good friend who's a noted Africanist and African art history teacher, teaches at Bates. And I just thought it was extraordinary, but I wanted to get her take on it. And she said, oh my God, there's nothing like this in the lexicon, because unfortunately many Africans during that time just didn't have the ability to shoot color. And what we ever saw really from that time was sort of the National Geographic ethnographic pictures of people in villages and that sort of thing. And this body of work really shows people in an emerging Africa that's got everything going on. And so it's not the National Geographic and it's not the safari pictures. It's like Africa happening in the late fifties. And interestingly, it was just when colonial rule was sort of turning over. So, for instance, there's one incredible picture from Togo when they declared their independence from France. So it's a time in Africa that's really exciting. So it was just fabulous. And then a woman named Erin Hyde Nolan, who had worked for me, who knew everything about Todd, they're actually good friends, and together they collaborated on putting together the Africa book. So it's great.

Lisa Belisle: What is it like to be working kind of posthumously on behalf of this great photographer?

Betsy Evans Hunt: Well, it's very gratifying. Todd and I were really good friends. I was so lucky to have met them. They wandered into my gallery in 1989, and they were in their eighties at the time. And they were four foot nothing, holding hands, the cutest couple you ever saw. And it took about a year, but we would start going out to lunch and they really became the elders in my life. My parents passed away around that same time. And so even though they're old enough really to be my grandparents, we just formed a real bond. So after a year or two I finally said, well, can I start representing you? And he said, sure. And so we did, I think, a three-month or a six-month sort of trial. And basically at that point I didn't have the gallery anymore, but I was selling through other galleries. So I had all these connections in New York and LA and Santa Fe and Boston. And so those galleries would sell the work and then I would give the money to Todd. I'd take a little bit of a commission. So it worked out and we really did well. And he became, they became a part of our family. And so when they were in their nineties, Chris was their doctor for a while, my husband. His first doctor was Dr. Thompson. Do you remember Dr. Phil Thompson? He was a GP. And then they would come for every holiday. So when they were in their nineties they said, we'd like for you to carry on. And I said, okay. So, quite frankly, he died in 2000 and he was almost 95, and she died in 2008. She was 102. And since then, I have to say I've had major ups and downs with it, because it was really hard for a while to really get traction. So it really wasn't until I got the trunks back and then also did the New York book that all of a sudden things started falling into place. So I'd had my moments of like, ah, what am I going to do? But now I'm on a steamroller, and we've got all these projects planned. And I just know that Todd and Lucille are smiling. And I quite frankly can't think of anything else that I'd rather be doing, or that I could be doing. So it's just one of those faithful things. So, really lucky.

Lisa Belisle: When I think about Todd as an individual, first of all, didn't he start out in finance?

Betsy Evans Hunt: He's a crazy story. So he was born in Detroit in 1905, in this Quaker family. When he was about 14, he asked some girl out to a tea dance without checking with somebody. And so his parents sent him up to Canada to live with his grandfather, which turned out, his grandfather was more lenient than his parents. So he lived outside of Toronto for his high school and college years. During that time he got some mountaineering experience, he did some park service work, which figures into the story later. So he comes back and he gets a job as a banker, yes, in the twenties in Detroit. And he was like, so un-Todd, because he was such a simple guy, but apparently he was making like a hundred thousand dollars back then, which, gosh knows what that would be now. And he had two cars and tons of girlfriends. And then the crash came in 1929 and he lost everything. And he got a job with Chrysler just to go deliver a car out west. And he got to north of San Francisco and he bought a burro and he went up and panned for gold for two years for the beginning of the depression. Made some money, but that's where this mountaineering thing came in. And he also had had ancestors who had come in the wagons across from the east coast to the Midwest. So he was always interested in all that kind of stuff. He actually had his great-grandfather's compass. So he did that. And then he was in San Francisco doing odd jobs and he got back to Detroit in the mid-thirties and got a job with Chrysler, which was sort of a middle management job. I'm not really clear as to what he was up to doing that, but that's when he got into photography. And I think when he came back, I think he rode the rails like a hobo coming back to get back to Detroit.

Lisa Belisle: And he and Lucille didn't get together as a married couple until they were in their forties, right?

Betsy Evans Hunt: Yes. And that's a crazy thing, because they met in Paris. So Todd was in New York right after the war for about two years, had great success there, got to know Alfred Stieglitz and O'Keeffe and everybody then. But then he got a job in 1948 with the Marshall Plan and also Standard Oil to go to Europe and photograph. Standard Oil was more sort of a propaganda thing, like, wow, how is oil good for your life kind of thing. But the Marshall Plan, he traveled, he was stationed in Paris, but he traveled to Belgium and Germany and Holland, taking pictures to see how everybody was rebuilding. So he was stationed in Paris and fell absolutely in love with Paris. He was absolutely in love with New York. He was absolutely in love with Paris. And after the second year he was there, this Lucille was with a group of people who somehow knew Todd, and they all got together, and they were in their early forties. They're actually exactly a year apart. So they're, I think, 43 and 44 years old, and it was just like, boom. I mean, they had both dated a ton of people, and Todd especially. And sadly, I now have his real journal and I've seen all the entries and I'm like, no, because he is sort of like a father, and I'm like, I don't want to hear this. But Lucille, so they always tell the story, they fell in love. Well, I found out from the journal, Lucille would kill me for saying this, but that she actually was married and she was traveling with her husband when she met Todd. And she came home and got divorced, and they were married like three months later. So I don't really know. But anyway, they had a wonderful marriage. They both obviously didn't have children because they were married late. But I think Lucille had an interesting situation, in that her mom left the family when she was young, sort of ran off with somebody. And then Todd also, his father did sort of the same thing, left when he was about 15. So I think they both, for whatever reason, decided they didn't want to have children. And at that point, in those days, they probably couldn't have. But they were living independent lives and loved what they were doing and had a fascinating life together. And a great marriage. So they were great.

Lisa Belisle: They must have been together for half a century.

Betsy Evans Hunt: They were. And they taught me a lot. It's interesting, so as I always say, don't go to bed angry, all that good stuff. So they were like parents to me, it was great.

Lisa Belisle: You and I, of course, share another connection, and that is that your husband is a family doctor, now retired, but someone who actually taught me at the medical center. And I know that when you are married to a doctor or someone in the profession, you're kind of married to the profession. This becomes kind of your life. And particularly in family medicine. Did that ever, were there ever kind of opportunities or challenges that occurred as you were trying to live this very different kind of life, doing the work in photography and curation and having a gallery?

Betsy Evans Hunt: No, I'm lucky enough to basically work for myself and work my own hours. So I definitely had flexibility. So it worked out. But when we first got together, it was sort of like, oh my god, he'd be on call and somebody would call and say the baby has 102 fever, and I'd be like, awake, waiting for the next call. How's that baby? Or somebody's in labor and they're four centimeters and I'd be like making the coffee, and he'd be like, no, just call me when she's like seven. I was like, are you kidding me? I was like, you gotta go now. So it was that sort of stuff, of me just not really being conversant. But I was always on the other end of the phone just listening intently. Family doctors are heroes, and they're sort of like the village priest in a way. And Chris really got out, the HMOs were sort of coming in and saying, you have five minutes for this and two minutes for that. And he just was the guy who wanted to do the hour-long physical. And so, sadly, that sort of went by the wayside, and he had other means and so he was able to retire. But everybody still stops me in the supermarket and says, we miss your husband, he was the greatest. And happily we have two daughters, and my oldest daughter, Lila, has a little baby girl, and she does a lot of wonderful work with the museum and that kind of stuff. And then we have a daughter, Sage, who just graduated from medical school and she's going to be a family doctor, so she's starting a residency now. So it's exciting.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I'm so glad that you're bringing up this relationship with Todd and your husband Chris. And I think it's interesting to me that you also needed to build that really trusting relationship with Todd. So this idea that relationships are really important, if you're going to do things in which trust and vulnerability are involved, is so necessary to understand.

Betsy Evans Hunt: No, it's true. It just came easily to me with Todd. We were pretty much in sync from the moment we met. And so there's almost an innate understanding between us. And so we both, having had the experience that I had with the gallery in San Francisco and then with Mapplethorpe and seeing all the glitzy stuff about the art world, Todd and I both were like, ugh, we hate that. So he said, if you like my work, great, buy it, if you don't, fine. We just understood each other right away. And so the trust was just forthcoming. It just happened very naturally. So, very lucky.

Lisa Belisle: Betsy, how can people learn more about Todd Webb?

Betsy Evans Hunt: Well, our website is toddwebbphotographs.com, and there's a lot of information on there. And then you could email us and get on our mailing list and that sort of thing, info@toddwebbphotographs.com. And the Portland Museum of Art is hosting the Africa show, opening in the middle of March. If you're in town, we'll be doing some events around that.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I encourage people who are interested in photography or history or culture or really anything to maybe get one of these books that I've had the chance to read. Maybe go to the Portland Museum of Art, or look up Betsy Evans Hunt. Because Todd Webb is really a brilliant photographer, and hearing his story just cemented in my mind how important it is that we pay attention to somebody, even as he's watching us from wherever he is, up in the sky somewhere. I've been speaking with Betsy Evans Hunt, and I really appreciate the time that you've taken with me today.

Betsy Evans Hunt: Thanks so much. Been a pleasure.