Bleak Beauty Blog

From left: Julie Galant with Anya (seated), Wendy Ewald and Martin Bondell(standing), Belinda Rathbone and Susan Meiselas (seated), Bleak Beauty Hudson Valley Farm 1987

Julie Galant died this Friday. With her passing a light went out for her children, her family, and for the world of pictures. I first met Julie at the Magnum office, then located on W 47^th street in the 1973, where the young staff was often more talented and interesting than the photographers they were working for. Ed Grazda was among them, so was Julie. In 1975 she and Martin Bondell would found Fotofolio, and make a family.

No one did more for the photography that we know today, and no one did it with less recognition, than Julie Galant at Fotofolio. She was a classy lady. In Fotofolio she matched a brilliant selection of photographs with the finest duotone reproductions, working exclusively with Sid Rappaport at his Canal Street Printing plant in Lower Manhattan. The company set a standard of distributing great pictures, gorgeously reproduced as miniatures, at rock bottom very un-art world like low prices. Anyone that wanted could buy and put the pictures on their wall for sixty cents a piece. It was a simple and democratic way to share great photographs beautifully reproduced for a very small price. The racks of Fotofolio cards where often some of the best shows in town.
Julie was not only a knock out, and a mother, but a compassionate, and tough business lady. She was impassioned about what she believed and she did a lot for the photographers she favored. By the early 1980’s, with all of my now famous books out of print, Fotofolio issued twenty-four of my best pictures as postcards, making them available to a generation that had never seen them. A labor of love as they say. How terrible that this lovely lady is gone. Someone should give her a Pulitzer prize in publishing.