Conversation: A Portrait of the Art Collector, and the Young Man

James Crump knows a thing or two about photography. As the founder of Arena Editions, an art photography publisher, he acquired and edited books about the giants of the medium, including Eugene Atget, Berenice Abbott, Walker Evans, Peter Beard, and Garry Winogrand, while authoring books about photographers George Platt Lynes and F. Holland Day. Indeed, it was a book project that brought him to filmmaking; after a proposed biography of enigmatic art collector Sam Wagstaff was turned down by several publishers, Crump explains, he “rejected their rejections,” and sought instead to tell Wagstaff’s story via a documentary.

The result is Black White + Gray, named for the polarizing and pioneering exhibition of minimalism Wagstaff staged in the early ‘60s at the Wadsworth Antheneum in Hartford. It was almost a decade later that he met a young photographer named Robert Mapplethorpe, with whom he embarked on a professional and personal relationship that would make Mapplethorpe both an art world superstar and a lightning rod in the culture wars of the late ‘80s. Wagstaff, on the other hand, has been strangely forgotten, a historical injustice which Crump seeks to rectify by tracing the trajectory of Wagstaff’s idiosyncratic life: his patrician roots, unhappy early career in advertising, discovery of his calling as a curator, impact on the practice of collecting photography, relationship with Mapplethorpe, and late-life fascination with American silver while ill with AIDS. Commentary from punk poet Patti Smith—a confidante of both men—as well as notables such as journalist/hobnobber Dominick Dunne, artist Richard Tuttle, photographer Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, art historian Eugenia Parry, and Christie’s director Philippe Garner helps to establish Wagstaff as a groundbreaking force in the postwar art world, whose unconventional photography collection helped establish the Getty Center’s holdings when the museum purchased it in 1984.

Black White + Gray premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival this year and has since played at the Seattle, Vancouver, and Copenhagen Film Festivals, Art Basel Switzerland, Silverdocs, and more. The film opens theatrically in New York City this Friday, with other cities to follow, as well as an upcoming date with the Sundance Channel and a DVD release early next year. Crump spoke recently about his own relationship with photography, the experience of making the film, and how he is and is not like Wagstaff.

How did you initially become passionate about photography?

I went back to graduate school when I was 30 years old, so I can identify with Sam Wagstaff because he went back to school so late. I realized after doing my undergraduate career in economics and working in business that I really wanted to pursue the arts, and be a writer of the arts. When I went back to school, I realized I had this love of photography. I’d always identified with it as a kid. I really loved fashion photography as a small boy. My mother had Vogue magazines lying around, and I think Richard Avedon was one of the first people I really dug. As a teenager, I wrote to the Avedon studio, wanting to become a studio assistant, like so many others.

You attended the seminal Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective at the Whitney in 1988. Would you say that this project has been germinating since then?

I think a lot of projects I've done in my career started there, frankly. My first book was on George Platt Lynes, a photographer who died in 1955, who had a remarkable influence over Robert Mapplethorpe. I also did my Ph.D on F. Holland Day, the person who crucified himself with a camera. He created these agonizing portrayals of himself depicting the seven last words of Christ, which were enormously influential on Mapplethorpe. I was also always fascinated with Sam Wagstaff from that moment on.

At its heart, Black White + Gray is a portrait of a collector. Is Sam Wagstaff’s collecting something you identify with?

I don't consider myself a collector. There's an obsessive-compulsive thread that runs through the personality of collectors, and while I may have an obsessive-compulsive thread, I'm not interested in collecting. I’m interested in other things. I was interested in Sam's aesthetics. How he developed his eye. He took it very seriously, and he didn't mince words. If you look at the way he articulated art, he was incredibly decisive when he talked. I really admire that, and I was also interested in it. I also felt that he was really putting himself out there to defend an aesthetic. That's something I could identify with. I take that very seriously myself, because I was a curator, and I was so heavily involved with object books and selecting, really curating, a series of incredible photographic books over a course of 10 years.

Isn’t that a form of collection?

It is a form of collection. It's more like curating, though.

When you began formally working on the movie in 2004, how did you go about your research and background work?

I had done a lot of research on Sam already, because I’d originally thought of it as a book. I had gone on eBay and collected his catalogues, and I’d made a couple of trips to the Smithsonian Archives of American Art in Washington, DC to look at his correspondence.

How did you go about striking a balance between a critical, art-historical portrait of Sam Wagstaff, and the more salacious details about his relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe and the gay lifestyle in New York at the time?

I think the Getty collection is really formidable, and was worthy of being part of the story. It's what drew me to Sam in the first place. But I also recognized, in terms of entertainment, the story had to be buffered with these personal elements—which are fascinating too—like his darker side, his sexuality, his upbringing, his relationship with Mapplethorpe. So it was a balancing act. I didn’t want it to seem like a titillating cheap shot. I wanted it to be more full-bodied. There have been reviews which said I didn’t focus enough on Sam’s S&M life or his sexuality. I feel like there’s quite a bit in there about Sam’s sex life. I never shied away from that, nor did I feel like I needed to censor myself. It is what it is. It’s commensurate with reality.

Another review in Variety criticized the depiction of Wagstaff’s move to collect silver at the end of his life, suggesting that the film represented it only as baffling contrarianism, rather than seeing it as a natural progression of his desire to collect aesthetic objects.

I was pleased with the Variety review. I thought it was very astute. But with regard to silver, I think that’s completely off the mark. I think there is an eccentricity at play. It is a conundrum. It’s not so easy to say that this fits into Sam’s acquisitiveness or relates to his development of collections. There’s something amiss here, and I think it has to do with childhood. He was very interested in silver as a little boy. It had to do with his obsessive-compulsiveness. And he might have seen an opportunity, because he recognized that silver was undervalued, but I think, moreover, he recognized in those objects something that was related to his past—something that was patrician, something that was old world, something that was very starchy and WASPy and very old New England, old New York. To me that’s where that’s coming from.

You pulled off another balancing act with your representation of Mapplethorpe. Some commentators offered harsh words about him, but others allowed for the possibility that he did give something back to Wagstaff, rather than it being all take, take, take.

If you were going to describe this film with one word, I would say it’s about enabling. I really did want to show how they gave each other something. It was very much a two-way street. I wanted to show that Sam was in a way parading Robert around the New York art world—so he was manipulating him, for his own ego. He was a tastemaker. He took it very seriously. When he put his chips on the table for an artist, it had to be something that made sense to him, because he was going to go out there and represent it to the world. It’s one of his acquisitions.

He collected people as well as objects.

Yes. If you look at Tony Smith, Richard Tuttle, those are previous acquisitions, in terms of the artists he chose to connect with and promote.

Did you feel that your interviewees were exhuming and coming to terms with Sam’s legacy for themselves, in the process of being interviewed?

Some of the interviews were really tough, because people were dredging up this past, and sometimes it was painful. There were a few tears shed, and there was some emotion exuding from some of these interviewees. And there were a few people who cut it off, who said, “I can’t go any further, it’s just too much for me.”

What mistakes did you make along the way that you’ll avoid the second time around? Will there be a second time around?

Yes, I’m working on a feature-length narrative project that I hope will go into pre-production soon. I learned a few technical things. We started this thing seat-of-the-pants, and, out of necessity, there were five directors of photography. I think next time I will actually work with a hand-selected director of photography and we’ll really work on the trajectory of the shoots. I like the way the film looks, but I feel there’s a language I want to have a little more consistency with.

What has it been like watching audiences engage with it and figure out for themselves who Sam Wagstaff was?

I’ve been pleased with the response so far. At Tribeca, it sold out all of its screenings, and the questions were astute. When I’ve screened it recently, people have been very moved by this personality, and they seemed to be very engaged with the story. I’m happy that the story of the two guys is intelligible and strong and forceful. It also redresses some of the mythology about Robert Mapplethorpe, and it introduces a character, Sam Wagstaff, who heretofore was not so well-known in the context of Mapplethorpe’s career—nor was he known for his work as a curator for 20 years before his relationship with Robert. So I’m happy, because it puts Sam on the map.