Nancy Lee Katz
Nancy Lee Katz worked as a film editor and still photographer. She then dedicated a period of twenty-five years to a private project of photographing people, mainly in the arts, whose work she respected. She kept the pictures entirely to herself, never offering them for sale, or for exhibit, or for publication, with the sole exception of a donation to Bibliothèque Nationale de France in gratitude for being able to use their facilities to research 19th Century photographs.
During the three weeks before her death, she went through the twenty boxes of prints and selected the best image of each subject, rating it good, uncertain, or bad. The images in the first two categories are being offered to museums worldwide, but not for sale, and as of August 2021, groups of photographs by this previously unknown artist have gone into the collections of Art Institute of Chicago, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Collection of the Supreme Court, Israel Museum, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts Houston, National Gallery of Art, National Gallery of Canada, New Orleans Museum of Art, and Rhode Island School of Design Museum of Art.
Michael S. Sachs (12 August 2021)
