A Very Personal Treasury

At his home in Bel-Air, photography collector Leonard Vernon shows a snapshot of his late wife, Marjorie. She is resting on her elbows and smiling up at the camera, lying on the floor of the couple’s home photo gallery, her legs playfully raised behind her. A portion of the couple’s collection of 5,000 photographs is strewn around her--on the work table, across the floor, hanging from the walls. “This is where she was most happy,” Vernon says.

It was where they were both most happy. They started collecting photographs on a whim in 1977, when there were only two galleries in Los Angeles that exclusively dealt photographs. (Now Bergamot Station alone boasts four.) Long before collecting photographs was fashionable, these two, choosing their acquisitions with an unself-conscious zeal, established themselves quite unwittingly as the premier collectors of photography in Southern California, and among the top photo collectors in the nation. Two lives that had been filled mostly with work and raising kids became a whirlwind of dealers, auctions, portfolios and sharing afternoon cocktails with Ansel Adams.

Marjorie died last November, after a few years battling cancer. Vernon himself still tears up when he talks about her, and he becomes especially emotional when discussing the show from their collection that will be on display at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art through Sept. 5, which is dedicated to her. Titled “An Eclectic Focus,” it features 150 of their most prized prints, from Richard Avedon through Andy Warhol, dating from 1840 to 1997. The exhibition, a kind of greatest hits from one of the greatest photo collections in the world, chronicles Vernon’s admitted preference for “beautiful” photography, but also pays homage to a most beautiful love story.

Vernon shuffles through a few more shots of Marjorie. Here’s one of her lying on the floor again, this time in front of the television, wearing a slightly askew Dodgers cap, a bowl of popcorn in front of her, a clicker to one side, and a statistics book to the other. “She liked to get everything ready,” Vernon says, smiling and shaking his head. Marjorie was known as a fireball, a real doer, and in the rakish tilt of the Dodgers cap, much too large for her head, one can see her sass and her spunk.

Vernon tells the story of how much Adams appreciated her vivacity. “There was a group of us that went up to Yosemite and spent a week,” Leonard says. “And one day Ansel and a group went up to the upper reaches of the park. It was about 12,000 feet up. Marjorie and Ansel were walking along a big rock outcropping, and she tripped, started to fall, and as she fell, she tucked herself into a little ball, turned over a couple times and came up on her feet. Well, Ansel was fascinated by how she had the presence to tuck herself and take care of herself.”

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Leonard, a quiet man, first discovered this quality when he and Marjorie were just kids. They grew up in the same Brooklyn neighborhood; Leonard once helped to baby-sit Marjorie and her brother. Their lives took them separate ways, though, and romance would not flourish until 1955, when they were both in their 30s. They ran into each other again, and even though Marjorie was living in California and Leonard in New York, after a six-month courtship they married and moved to Los Angeles.

Just as they found their love for each other late in life, they didn’t discover their passion for collecting photography until they were each into their 50s. On New Year’s Eve of 1977, they traveled to Carmel to visit friends. Leonard, a real estate developer, stepped out for a walk and passed by the Weston Gallery, at the time one of the only photo galleries in California. He ventured in for a look-see and noticed a picture that he might like to buy. Margaret Weston, the owner of the gallery, was on the phone, but she took his card and showed up in Los Angeles 10 days later with a whole case of prints.

On that first day, Leonard didn’t go alone to see the photos, though. He did everything else with Marjorie; why not this too? As soon as Weston spread out the prints, Leonard says, he felt a rush. “It was something we were obviously ready for,” he says. “It was completely unplanned, it just happened, but it was the best thing that ever happened to us.” Leonard felt something else that day too, something that would emerge as a central element of his and Marjorie’s collecting life. It was a sixth sense about which photos they wanted to acquire.

“I don’t know how to describe it or explain it,” Vernon says. “But from day one, absolutely, we didn’t have to talk to each other. We would drive the dealers crazy. They would show us 24 prints or so, and I would know, and Marjorie would know, right away which ones we were going to get serious about.”

In a flurry, they bought 17 prints from Margaret Weston. Among them was a 1906 print by Heinrich Kuehn titled “Child on a Hill.” To this day, Leonard simply calls the photograph “Marjorie.” It portrays a precocious girl peering out from under a wide-brimmed hat, a walking stick held nonchalantly in her hand. It was the first picture Marjorie bought, and it remained beloved to her. “When she saw it, she said, ‘My God, that’s me,’ ” Leonard says. The photo is the first image visitors see as they walk into the Santa Barbara exhibition.

The Vernons’ relationship with Weston would remain a cornerstone of their collecting life. Weston introduced them to Carmel heavyweights like Adams and Edward Weston, and Leonard soon became a board member of Adams’ now-legendary Friends of Photography. Margaret Weston also helped steer them through the world of auctions, dealers and lending. “They really became like part of our family,” she says.

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For Leonard, collecting represented a new life, but also a return to an old one. “When I was in my late teens,” he says, “I was convinced I was going to be, as I call it, the world’s most famous fashion photographer. By the time I was 21, I decided I better get out and get a job.” He continued to keep a darkroom in the house, though, and always subscribed to two or three photography magazines, staying abreast of trends and figures in the field.

From the start, Leonard and Marjorie were not typical collectors, partly because they didn’t harbor illusions about creating a collection per se. “It wasn’t a matter of right away saying, ‘Gee, we have got a fantastic collection here, let’s make it important,’ ” Leonard says. “We were just having a wonderful time.” Relying on their collective intuition as their primary guide, they weren’t interested in collecting a certain genre, or certain photographer. “We were interested in the image, and what the image said to us,” Leonard says. “For example, a dealer would come and say, ‘You just have to have this in your collection.’ And while I was pleasant, I would tell them, I don’t have to have that picture at all.”

So, what exactly did they like? “Almost everything appealed to us,” Leonard says. “Except that we were not interested in the work of a photographer who could see nothing beautiful in the world.”

They traveled to New York at least twice a year for auctions. Marjorie’s affinity for 19th century work took them to London and elsewhere in Europe. Pilgrimages to San Francisco, which once had many more photo galleries than L.A., were regular. Leonard eventually came to serve on boards at MOCA in Los Angeles, the Museum of Photographic Arts in San Diego, and the Museum of Art in Santa Barbara. In 1980, they set an auction record when they purchased Gertrude Kasebier’s “Blessed Art Thou Amongst Women,” which became Marjorie’s favorite. Collecting became their life, in part because of the photographs they were seeing, but also, as Leonard says, “because people in photography, with very minor exceptions, were very good people.”

Appropriately, the Vernons lived their collecting life out of their home. Leonard also ran his business from a room in the house, which allowed him that much more time around Marjorie. He would work while she cataloged prints and called dealers. Finally, 10 years ago, they built a gallery and a cement vault, and began to computerize and organize the prints in a more, uh, curatorial fashion. With prints sticking out of every unoccupied space in the house, Leonard said, such a move became a clear necessity.

Indeed, while putting together the Santa Barbara exhibition, curator Karen Sinsheimer says she came across a strange location reference in the Vernon’s files--UTB. She asked Vernon about it, and he cleared it up immediately: “Under the Bed.”

The Vernons also became very generous with their collection. Groups from public and private schools and colleges throughout Southern California, as well as art clubs from all over the country, crowded regularly into their modest home to peer gape-mouthed at the Imogene Cunningham and Paul Strand prints hanging next to the bathroom door. “Tours” that were supposed to last an hour often stretched to two or three. It wasn’t uncommon for the Vernons to pass around, say, a Henry Fox Talbot that had been taken in 1845, and let their guests actually hold it.

On these occasions, they had only two conditions: “One, that you don’t talk over the picture, and two, that you don’t sneeze,” Leonard remembers. No pictures were ever damaged.

They also refused to hoard, lending out about 150 pictures each year to Southern California museums like MOCA, the Getty Center, and LACMA, but also to the Met and MOMA in New York and other major institutions like the Art Institute of Chicago and the National Gallery of Art in Washington.

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After 20 years, they ended up with a collection almost unparalleled among private holdings in its breadth, and which, because of the unintellectualized way they went about collecting, represents an artwork unto itself. It is a mammoth testament to their love for each other and for photography, and it includes scores of undeniable classics, a heavy emphasis on 19th century work, vast collections of Adams and Edward Weston, more than 100 prints of single trees, a surprising number of abstracts, and an impressive selection of recent work by emerging artists.

“It just goes right across the board, which is quite amazing in a way, and which makes the collection so tremendous,” Margaret Weston says. ‘There is everything in there, and yet it seems to come together, because it all reflects their taste and their tremendous eye.”

Notice that Weston uses the singular “eye.”

Leonard continues to collect. When he does, he says he still follows his intuition, choosing only what appeals to him on a personal level. One wonders, is there still another voice helping him along?

“Oh yeah,” he says, as if the question needn’t even be asked.*

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“An Eclectic Focus: Photographs From the Vernon Collection” continues through Sept. 5 at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1130 State St., Santa Barbara, (805) 963-4364. Tuesdays-Saturdays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sundays, 12-5 p.m.