The starting point for this exhibition is a magnificent vintage print from baudoin's archives of the iconic portrait by Robert Mapplethorpe of Sam Wagstaff (1921-1987), his lover and celebrated art curator and collector of photography. Wagstaff's "eye" was unique and brought to the new photography market works from wide-ranging periods and styles, from erotica to landscape to portraits: "Wagstaff’s curatorial genius and mania was juxtaposition. He paired discontinuous photographs to create a strange beauty, adding to the odd resonance of the photographs themselves." In 2016, the Getty Center's exhibition of Wagstaff’s photography collection was entitled the ‘The thrill of the chase: the Wagstaff Collection of Photographs' and presented with the following text:

“Samuel J. Wagstaff Jr. was an influential art curator, patron and collector. In 1973, with the assistance of his lover Robert Mapplethorpe, Wagstaff came to believe that art photography was significantly undervalued. Over the next decade, he assembled one of the most important private collections of photographs in the world, which helped raise the profile of the medium and the price of photographic works. When he sold his collection to the J. Paul Getty Museum in 1984, it became the cornerstone of the Museum’s newly formed Department of Photographs.”

Art critic Bruce Hainley writes that, “Although Wagstaff’s experience as a curator, at both the Wadsworth Anthenaeum and Detroit’s Institute of Fine Arts, and his collecting and early love of Minimalist and Pop art contributed to the training of his famous eye, pleasure remained the most important principle behind Wagstaff’s turn to photography. It is the best explanation for how and why Wagstaff put together not only one of the most wide-ranging but also one of the most original photography collections in the world, which encompassed... early-nineteenth- century French photography, early-twentieth-century British, some late-twentieth-century American, Xeroxes of `found’ images, images to be viewed through a stereoscope, and postcards and photo-graphs of a personal obsession—cats.” Attracted to anonymous or provocative images, Wagstaff also championed the artistic genius of early documentarians of the American landscape, such as Timothy H. O’Sullivan, and prompted critical reevaluations of forgotten masters, such as Nadar, Carleton Watkins, and Gustave Le Gray."

Inspired by Sam Wagstaff’s ‘thrill of the chase’, and by the same pleasure principle driving his choices, galerist Miranda Salt plunged this winter into the vast archives of baudoin lebon gallery, amassed over more than 40 years of activity and stored in the gallery's new location in Clairefontaine just outside of Paris, in a converted 12th century monastery. Fir this exhibition, Miranda has curated a deliberately ecclectic proposal of rare works, both classics and curios from the history of photography, treasures to be discovered amonsgt the lush vegetation of Terri Weifenbach's contemporary images from her recent Des Oiseaux and Cloud Physics series.

Sam Wagstaff, à propos

Curator, collector and patron of the arts, mentor and lover of Robert Mapplethorpe, Sam Wagstaff had an incalculable influence on the world of contemporary art and photography, and on the evolution of gay identity in the latter part of the twentieth century. Born in New York City in 1921 into an upper-class family, Wagstaff's early years followed the expected schema of his peers: after attending Hotchkiss and Yale, he served in the Navy and then become an ad executive on Madison Avenue. With his patrician good looks, Wagstaff was considered one of the most eligible bachelors of the late 1940s. However, forced to hide his homosexuality, Wagstaff became increasingly uncomfortable with his career and his double life. Abandoning advertising, he turned to art history and embarked on a personal transformation that echoed the social, cultural, and sexual upheavals of the 1960s. In 1961 Wagstaff became curator of the Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum in Hartford, Connecticut, where he orchestrated "Black, White, and Gray" - the first museum show of minimal art - while lending his early support to artists Andy Warhol, Ray Johnson, and Richard Tuttle, among many others.

Returning to New York City in 1972, fifty-year-old Wagstaff met twenty-five-year-old Robert Mapplethorpe, who was then living with Patti Smith. Throughout their lifelong relationship, as lovers and friends, Mapplethorpe would nourish Wagstaff's interest in contemporary photography and Wagstaff helped build Mapplethorpe's reputation in the art world. Along with a small group of passionate collectors and dealers - Harry Lunn, Rudi Kicken, Gérard Levy, Daniel Wolf, Philippe Garner, Stephen White, George Rinhart - Wagstaff is today considered responsible for creating the photography marketplace as it exists today. Sam Wagstaff died in New York in 1987, of pneumonia arising from AIDS. Mapplethorpe died from AIDS two years later, in 1989, aged 42.

Terri Weifenbach, à propos

Born in New York in 1957, Terri Weifenbach lived in New Mexico and California before settling in Washington DC. She now lives in Burgundy, France. Her immersive approach characterizes a work that is mainly interested in nature and our perception of it. The creation and design of books holds a major place in her photographic practice. Since the publication in 1997 of her first book In Your Dreams, she has designed twenty others including Gift, co-signed with the Japanese photographer Rinko Kawauchi. In 2019, she published in the Des Oiseaux collection, followed by Cloud Physics (2021) and the commissioned Giverny, une année au jardin (2022) all published by Atelier EXB. Her work is regularly presented in museums and international institutions in the United States, Europe and Japan as well as in various collections such as the Center for Creative Photography (Arizona), the Sprengel Museum (Hanover, Germany) and the Hermès Collection in Paris. Terri Weifenbach received the Guggenheim Prize in 2015.

Press release - Spring 2025 Treasure hunt Wagstaff