The Way He Sees It

“I believe that really good collectors are artists,” says David Raymond, who holds some of the world’s most coveted examples of Surrealist photography. Photo by Rimas Zailskas
“I believe that really good collectors are artists,” says David Raymond, who holds some of the world’s most coveted examples of Surrealist photography. Photo by Rimas Zailskas

Art collecting is an art unto itself for David Raymond, an internationally known collector of Surrealist and modernist photography.

“I believe that really good collectors are artists,” says Raymond, who lives south of Asheville. “You’re putting these pieces together and creating a context for these works that might not have had anything to do with each other. That is an art form, if it’s done well.”

Eating a pumpkin-spice doughnut at a coffee house in mid October, Raymond tells how he came to assemble one of the world’s most significant collections of Surrealist photography. (A large portion of it is being exhibited through January 11 in a major show at the Cleveland Museum of Art.)

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Encompassing painting, photography, and other media, the Surrealist movement began in the 1920s as artists nudged aside reason as the prism for interpreting the world and replaced it with the dream state that rejects probability. Photos by Man Ray, Dora Maar, and René Magritte challenged viewers’ perceptions in imperceptible ways. Which is exactly what draws Raymond to photos of the era.

“I want someone to say, literally, ‘I’m going to [mess with] the way you see things. I’m going to help you go into some other realm of reality,’” says Raymond. He loves it, he says, when a photograph tells him: “Be patient, and I’ll show you.”

Raymond was an art dealer in San Francisco when he first got into Surrealist photography. At the time, he had a client who was building a photography collection. “I was finding him masterpieces, and he was rejecting a lot,” Raymond recalls. “His tastes were good, but not sophisticated. I was going, ‘Wow, wait a minute, a museum would give their right arm for this; I can’t let these go.’ All of a sudden, I found myself buying things that I was showing him.”

Man Ray photos aside, Raymond was surprised at how affordable other pieces from the Surrealist period were. “There were other photographers at the time who were as important to the history of art [as Man Ray], but hadn’t been taken over by the greater marketplace, so I started hunting works by them,” he says.
Left: By French graphic artist Georges Hugnet; Right: By By Rebecca Reeve, from the series Marjory’s World, 2012

Well connected to the art world and its dealers and players, Raymond became known as the guy who was interested in these works, which are often dark, or at least unsettling. Soon he had so many rare, high-quality prints that they took over his New York City apartment. Wanting to keep the collection together, he sold and donated a large portion in 2007 to the Cleveland museum, which appreciated his eye for acquisition. In fact, shortly after Carolina Home + Garden’s interview with Raymond, Yale University Press released a book about the artistic coup, titled Forbidden Games: Surrealistic and Modernist Photography (The David Raymond Collection in the Cleveland Museum of Art).

The founder and chairman of the Global Auction Network, Raymond had served as artistic director for Magnum Photo in Paris and had advised the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles. (He has also been named a top-100 American collector by Art & Antiques Magazine and by the Art Market Guide, and has been an advisor to the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.)

Raymond goes with his gut when he decides whether or not to buy a new work (he collects art of all kinds). “I look at something, and I feel a vibe, an energy,” he says. “It either has a high vibration, or it’s just there. I would see something and think, ‘This thing is off the charts.’ I didn’t need to know anything about it. I just knew that it was significant.”

Raymond believes collectors have a duty to share their collections. “If you’re blessed enough to live with it, don’t lock it away. Allow others to enjoy it too,” he says. He has lent portions of his Surrealist collection to museums all over the world, including the Getty, the Hamburger Kunsthalle in Germany, and the McMullen Museum of Art at Boston College. Some of his holdings were recently part of a collections exhibit at Castell Photography Gallery in Asheville.

The collector visited Asheville in the 1980s and moved to the area in 2012, partly because Western North Carolina’s temperate-rainforest climate reminded him of the Amazonian rain forests where he’d had transformative experiences years ago. A filmmaker currently working on a documentary, DONG, about Vietnamese families who ended up in Oklahoma after the fall of Saigon, Raymond also uses his eye to elevate the ordinary: through early January at Western Carolina University’s Fine Art Museum, he’ll exhibit Other People’s Pictures.

The show is not high-end, collectable photography, but rather his own “re-contextualized” versions of ordinary snapshots. These are personal treasures, another type of “found” art, scored by Raymond from flea markets around the world.

Visit David Raymond’s website, eyeofeternity.com; For more information on Other People’s Pictures visit wcu.edu/museum.

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