Light Gallery
Light Gallery
June 4, 2001
Tennyson Schad, 70, Lawyer; Founded Photography Gallery
By MARGARETT LOKE
Tennyson Schad, a First Amendment lawyer whose brainchild, Light Gallery, was the bold commercial showcase for contemporary photographers in the 1970's and the training ground for an unusually large number of today's gallery directors, died on May 26 in Manhattan. He was 70 and lived in Manhattan.
The cause was cancer, said his wife, Fern.
When Mr. Schad opened Light Gallery, at 1018 Madison Avenue, at 78th Street, in November 1971, photography as a collectible was in its infancy, and the market in contemporary photography almost nonexistent. He began by offering the work of photographers like Harry Callahan, Aaron Siskind, and Frederick Sommer. There was one other New York commercial gallery devoted solely to photography, the Witkin, which had opened in 1969 offering prints from the 19th and 20th centuries.
Light Gallery set out to do what no commercial gallery had done: represent exclusively the work of contemporary photographers. Mr. Schad bankrolled the enterprise, arranging for books and limited-edition portfolios to be published, said Ms. Schad. Mr. Schad paid regular visits to his gallery but ceded aesthetic control and the daily operation to the gallery director and his staff.
The first director was Harold Jones, whom Mr. Schad wooed away from the George Eastman House of Photography in Rochester. Light offered the first Paul Strand show since Stieglitz's day, said Mr. Jones, and it was also among the first to show Robert Mapplethorpe's work. Mr. Jones went on to become the first director of the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Ariz.
Robert Mann, the last official director of Light, who has since opened his own gallery, recalled that he was hired by Mr. Schad in 1983 ''to liquidate the inventory or resurrect'' the gallery. Mr. Schad had overexpanded Light, which had moved in 1976 to spacious quarters at 724 Fifth Avenue. It closed in 1987, with the Schads dealing privately from their home.
But while it lasted, what went on at Light Gallery was a heady experience for its staff and visitors. ''Everybody was there,'' said Peter McGill, who was the gallery's first intern, in the summer of 1973. For the first time, he said, ''artists had a first-rate art gallery to show their work.'' He was director in 1979-80 before opening his own gallery, Pace/McGill, in 1983.
Laurence Miller, who arrived at Light in mid-1974 to be assistant to Mr. Jones, said that Mr. Schad was ''this lawyer who believed in photography as an exciting art form, believed in people who made the pictures and believed in us who implemented this vision.'' Mr. Miller was the gallery's associate director until 1980, when he left, eventually opening his own gallery, too.
''Tennyson never played it safe,'' said Helen Gee, whose Limelight in Greenwich Village was the only long-running commercial photography gallery in the country in the 1950's. ''He showed photographers who were not famous, young photographers with fresh new ideas.''
Tennyson Schad was born on Aug. 12, 1930, in Larchmont, N.Y. He was a graduate of Williams College and New York University Law School and began his legal career as an associate at Cravath, Swaine & Moore. While he was associate editorial counsel at Time Inc., from 1962 to 1969, he developed a passion for photography. Ms. Schad, a former picture editor at Life magazine, recalled that sometime in 1970 her husband decided that photography was a collectible. He had photojournalism in mind, until Shawn Callahan, then deputy director of photography at Life, introduced him to the work of fine-art photographers like Harry Callahan and Siskind.
Mr. Schad's first marriage, to Sabra Guthrie Packard, ended in divorce. In addition to his wife, he is survived by a twin brother, David Robert, of York, Pa.; four daughters, Anne Verrill of Portland, Me., Sarah Griffin and Sabra Hellmer of Portland, Ore., and Katherine Schad, of New York City; and four grandchildren.
Mr. Schad's other passion was journalism. For the last 30 years he was outside counsel for Forbes magazine. James Michaels, editor of Forbes magazine for much of that period and now vice president/editorial at Forbes Inc., said that Mr. Schad ''was a journalist before he was a lawyer.'' Mr. Schad handled hundreds of libel suits, Mr. Michaels said, but ''we never had to settle a case'' to pay off the litigant.
Correction: June 30, 2001, Saturday An obituary on June 4 about Tennyson Schad, founder of the Light Gallery in Manhattan, described the gallery's exhibition of the photographer Paul Strand incorrectly. It was not the first Strand show since Stieglitz's day. A retrospective of Strand's work opened in November 1971, two months earlier than the Light Gallery's show.
Copyright 2008 The New York Times Company
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