Judy Glickman Lauder’s Vast Trove of Photography Is a Portrait of Its Collector

A child of a photo enthusiast, Judy Glickman Lauder—the widow of billionaire art collector Leonard Lauder—has collected photographs since the 1970s. An exhibition of part of her collection is now touring the U.S., featuring some 100 prints by 50 artists, having kicked off this summer at the Southampton Arts Center in New York. Divided into eight thematic sections and curated by Anjuli Lebowitz, the selection includes work by eminent practitioners like Nan Goldin, Graciela Iturbide, Danny Lyon, Susan Meiselas, Gordon Parks and James Van Der Zee.

Spanning quotidian moments to historic pinnacles, “Presence: The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder” examines different facets of human vulnerability. The title of the exhibition is in reference to theorist Roland Barthes’ pronouncement: “Every photograph is a certificate of presence.” The exhibition will migrate to the Sarasota Art Museum in Florida in 2026-2027, the Gibbes Museum of Art in South Carolina in 2027 and the Lowe Art Museum in Florida in 2027-2028.

Down the line, Lauder will donate her entire collection to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine. This includes some of her own work, for which Lauder traveled to Europe to document sites related to the Holocaust as a chilling record of an unthinkable period. We spoke to the collector, photographer and philanthropist about her family legacy—both she and her dad belonged to the Royal Photographic Society of Great Britain—plus her penchant for 20th-century images and her work with infrared film.

Tell me about your trajectory within the world of photography. You very much grew up around the medium.

My father was a doctor, but his passion was photography. I was the subject in front of my dad’s big Graflex camera, with the black cloth and the light meters and all that. I was in the dark room as a child, mesmerized by the magic of it, seeing images appear in the developer.

My dad was the president of the Oakland Camera Club, which met in Berkeley; his friends were Ansel Adams and Edward Weston. They knew about images, composition, beautiful darkroom papers. He did a commercial, which is on YouTube; it [won a] Clio in the ’60s. It’s of a child growing up and becoming an adult with a child of her own; it’s called the Kodak Turnaround commercial.

When did your own practice take form?

I became a photographer many years later. I was born in the late ’30s, I didn’t really start learning dark room [technique] until the ’70s. I’m a mom of four: I was busy taking color snapshots of every child, every graduation, every trip, blah blah blah. In the ’70s, I was a docent at UCLA at an art museum on campus; I was doing some postgraduate work. I started going to photography workshops where I learned [to use the] dark room, and it opened up avenues for my own creative expression.

I photographed with Kodak Tri-X, but I also worked a lot with Kodak high-speed infrared film, which is no longer around like it was. I used that especially when I was photographing Holocaust images after the fact in Eastern Europe. I came in the ’80s, but there were still remnants. For three years, I went to camps, railroad tracks, former ghettos, memorials and everything, and infrared gave it a grainy timelessness, but you never know what you’re getting with infrared. I was photographing through two cameras: one with black and white, and one with infrared. The soul of my work is that Holocaust work.

I was asked to go to Denmark in the early ’90s to put together an exhibit dealing with the Danish rescue of the Jews in October ’43. The Danes were hiding Jews secretly in their homes, in their warehouses and getting them on boats in the middle of the night. Nothing was documented. A lot of the rescuers were teenagers at the time, driving their family’s herring boats at great risk. I was able to interview survivors, resistance people, rescuers, and they took me to all these places where it happened.

Do you remember the first photo that anchored your collection?

I had moved from Northern California to Southern California; in Los Angeles, there were two photography galleries, G. Ray Hawkins and Stephen White, and I would see all these images, and many of them were affordable because it hadn’t really caught on as the beautiful art form that photography is. Early images that I purchased were by Jerry Uelsmann: three images of his wife. It’s a positive, a negative and, I think, solarization. Very mystical. Another one was by Barbara Morgan, who [photographed] a lot of Martha Graham, she did a New York winter park scene superimposing another negative of a dancer and a photogram of two white tulips.

I’m drawn to the human presence. I have a beautiful print by Arthur Rothstein. Dorothea Lange. A lot of images are very timeless. Some are decisive-moment images. Many by women photographers: Judy Dater, Cherie Heiser, Margaret Bourke-White. I have a wonderful image of Mick Jagger and Bianca on their wedding day, Patti Smith with Robert Mapplethorpe and just a whole lot of different rock and roll [figures]. I’m very interested in the civil rights period in the United States in the ’50s and ’60s: I have a lot of images from Selma, Birmingham, Montgomery, Atlanta and so on.

I ended up having a collection of 700 images, gradually over 50 years. My husband and I were both on the board of the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, and I gave my collection to them. It was an opportunity to see all these images because I had no room to hang them. It was the first time I was able to really put it all together. Some say it’s sort of a “self-portrait” because it tells you a little something about yourself. When I look at the collection, it tells me a bit about different segments that I’m drawn to. There’s the injustices, of course, the civil rights period. But there’s a lot of labor, like Salgado, the gold mines in Africa. I also have Salgado’s work from Kuwait, the people trying to get rid of the fire of the oil wells. And I have humor: Elliott Erwitt’s humor and Melanie Bennett’s.

I’m still more drawn to the 20th Century, rather than what is going on today.

Why is that?

I’m not able to see the timelessness yet in much of the work that’s being done today. I grew up in a certain era, and I’m still drawn to it. I look at everything, but the images that I purchase seem to be from the ’40s to the ’90s.

You were saying that your collection became too big to display. How did you experience the collection in a day-to-day way beforehand? Were you turning over the images that you would exhibit in your home?

I really didn’t. That takes a lot of energy, a lot of time, and I was very busy with my own photography. Images that I purchased I would keep for a while, but then I would just always give them to the museum. I have a lot of photographs in my house, but not so much changing [up] different ones. As life went on, I knew that these photographs would hold together as a collection, and I wanted a museum to have it.

Do you collect other forms of art, or exclusively photography?

Oh, sure. I do have some sculpture and some paintings. I love old things. I love the treasure hunts and flea markets, thrift shops, antique places. Maine is kind of a mecca for that type of thing.

For the exhibition, it’s 100 photographs by about 50 photographers. Does it feel like more of a spotlight on a particular thread, or does it feel emblematic of the collection at large?

It’s a spotlight: it’s really the human spirit. There’s wonderful humor, there’s photojournalism, there’s portraiture like you wouldn’t believe. Photography is something that people just automatically relate to. Everyone has a cell phone or camera, they know what they’re saying. They don’t have to know 18th-century Japanese woodcuts. They see it and boom: it hits them. These were chosen by Aperture and the Portland Museum of Art curator Angeli Libowitz. At the time, with Chris Boot, who was the director of Aperture, we all met to decide what should be shown. There’s many ways it can be shown. I have four [of my own] Holocaust-related images, and I have one that I took in Istanbul.

Which is the most recent photograph that you’ve purchased?

I was at AIPAD, and I purchased a couple paparazzi photographs of Jackie O. and Robert Redford—just candid, wonderful images. I have fun with celebrity. I recently got a portrait of Edward Hopper, the painter, in Maine. They’re a bit more expensive than they were in the ’70s, but there are still treasures, and people should be out there looking.

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