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Sunday, May 9, 2010

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Russell Yip / The ChronicleAndy Pilara of San Francisco has opened the largestgallery space for photography in the country on Pier 24.

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In the small world of photographycollecting, investment bankerAndy Pilara was a completeunknown until the day he walkedinto San Francisco's FraenkelGallery and walked back out withthe first picture he had everbought, a Diane Arbus.

Seven years later, Pilara, 68, has built acollection of 20th century Americandocumentary photography so vast andcomprehensive that he had to rent a vacant

warehouse on the Embarcadero just to display it.

Located below the Bay Bridge, Pier 24 offers 28,000square feet of display space. To put that in perspective,it is four times the size of the photography galleries onthe third floor of the San Francisco Museum ofModern Art, one of the largest dedicated photographyspaces at any museum in the United States.

To visit SFMOMA will cost you $15. To visit Pier 24 isfree if you make an appointment. Pilara has bought2,000 vintage pictures and opened the single largestvenue for looking at photography in this city and thisstate and this country. It is not a museum, becausethere are no boards or committees or docents or

fundraisers. It is not a commercial gallery, because nothing is for sale.

The experience is overwhelming, which is the intent. "I hope it means they come back,"says Pilara, who had never seriously collected anything except baseball cards whilegrowing up in the Sunset District. "It's a passion that I can't put words to."

"I have not seen anything like it," says SFMOMA curator of photography Sandra Phillips,who has seen every major photography repository in the Western world. "There arephotography museums, but nothing so spectacular and so personal and so giving to theexperience of looking at a photograph. The whole thing is truly unique."

The "photography space," as Pilara calls it, has not had an official opening. The Web site,at www.pier24.org, is not yet live, and there is no signage. But in the few months sinceword has leaked out, Pier 24 has attracted curators from the National Gallery of Art inWashington, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney

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Museum of American Art, all in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago, amongothers.

"It is absolutely a world-class collection that brings tremendous value to San Franciscoas a key center for the study of photography," says gallery owner Jeffrey Fraenkel, whorecently took one of London's premier gallerists through the collection. That takes anhour and a half to do right, and that is without any wall text or even the names of thephotographers. That is just to see the 300 pictures, or 15 percent of the entire body ofwork, that are now on display.

The spree started when Pilara was taken by his wife, Mary, a volunteer docent inpainting at SFMOMA, to see "Revelations," the Diane Arbus retrospective co-organizedby Phillips, which opened at SFMOMA in October 2003.

Arbus, who took her own life in 1971, was interested in photographing people whommost avoid looking at, and Pilara was deeply moved by it. He walked from the show tohis apartment on Market Street, and he looked up the Arbus estate's representatives.

That is when he first learned of Fraenkel Gallery on Geary, which over the past 30 yearshas established itself as one of the most respected photo galleries in the country. Thenext day, Pilara walked to the Fraenkel Gallery, which is about the same distance aswalking from his home to SFMOMA.

"At the beginning, other than buying a photograph that was extremely unusual as anacquisition, I wasn't paying a great deal of attention to him," Fraenkel says. "No one, notI and not even he, knew what was ahead in terms of his ambition."

Pilara says his main ambition was "to exercise the other side of my brain," meaning theside that doesn't do math. The math side was disengaged so well that he doesn't knowhow much he has invested in photography, or the build-out of the space, and he doesn'twant to know. He is an art dealer's dream.

"In the investment world, I look at every number to the penny," Pilara says. "This is notan investment, so I don't really pay attention to what it costs."

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clodagh831 7:11 AM on May 9, 2010

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1 reply

Am growing really tired of being tricked into clicking on a story only to find out it will be daysbefore I can read it. This is going to backfire on you so why not just stop? It is incredibly stupid.

jdonegan 10:55 AM on May 11, 2010

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I would love to see his work as a photographer, now that he has developed his uniqueperspective as a collector. I hear the biggest collectors of photography are other photographers.

theloniousbop 8:59 AM on May 9, 2010

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Why are you telling us this now? Why not just run it on Tue? Waste of your and our time.

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