Nancy Lee Katz’s “Pantheon”

By Malcolm Daniel
The Gus and Lyndall Wortham Curator of Photography

Even before taking up the camera, Félix Tournachon, known as Nadar, was a keen observer of character and physiognomy, a caricaturist of enormous talent. In his most ambitious endeavor, Nadar (1820–1910) set out in 1852 to produce the Panthéon Nadar, a suite of four giant lithographs, each incorporating 250 portraits-charges (exaggerated portraits) of the period’s greatest actors and playwrights, musicians, artists, and authors. The task was enormous, and after two years of work and mounting debt, he had produced only a single sheet—the one depicting France’s great writers.

To accomplish even this, Nadar relied upon the vast network of compatriots he had developed as a theater critic, writer, and caricaturist for the popular press and the imagined promise of further celebrity that would come from inclusion in the Panthéon Nadar. A gregarious public personality himself, he drew others to him with a magnetically engaging sociability. Not surprisingly, when Nadar took up photography in 1854, his best works portrayed artist friends and like-minded leftists, people whose writing, music, art, acting, or political stance he admired and felt a deep connection to—figures such as Alexandre Dumas, the famed author of The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo. By contrast, Nadar had little interest in the random patron who walked into his lavish studio on the boulevard des Capucines; for them, he often contributed little more than his brand, leaving the portrait session itself to one of his operators.

Nancy Lee Katz, too, had a pantheon. In the course of 25 years, she photographed nearly 200 men and women she deemed to be the leading lights of her age, particularly in the realms of music and art. To a degree even greater than Nadar, Katz (1947–2018) focused exclusively on her pantheon. She never ran a portrait studio; never photographed subjects who did not fascinate her for the brilliance of their art, jurisprudence, musical composition, or performance; and was never guided by the fame of her subjects or marketability of their images since none were intended to be offered for sale or distribution. Still, the list of those who sat before her camera reads like a Who’s Who of composers (Pierre Boulez, Henri Dutilleux, Phillip Glass, Olivier Messiaen, Tobias Picker, Stephen Sondheim); performers of all sort (Laurie Anderson, Vladimir Horowitz, Evgeny Kissin, Marcel Marceau, Mstislav Rostropovich, Andre Watts); playwrights and writers (Edward Albee, Quentin Crisp, Allen Ginsburg, Elie Wiesel, Robert Wilson); jurists (Harry Blackmun, Ruth Bader Ginsberg, Sandra Day O’Connor, William Powell, William Rehnquist); painters and sculptors (John Baldessari, Fernando Botero, Louise Bourgeois, Paul Cadmus, Cai Guo-Qiang, Vija Celmins, Christo, Chuck Close, Helen Frankenthaler, Leon Golub, Jasper Johns, Alex Katz, Ellsworth Kelly, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Annette Messager, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Ed Ruscha, Richard Serra); architects (Norman Foster, Maya Lin, Phillip Johnson, Richard Meier); and fellow photographers (Ilse Bing, Brassaï, Harry Callahan, Alfred Eisenstaedt, Elliott Erwitt, Yousuf Karsh, O. Winston Link, Gordon Parks, Marc Riboud, Aaron Siskind, William Wegman), to name only a few.

Unlike Nadar, however, Katz was an extremely private person, unknown to virtually all her subjects before approaching them with the proposal for a portrait sitting. In the age of LinkedIn and Facebook, whose very raison d’être is to create a network that emboldens one to contact a friend of a friend of a friend, Katz never exploited one subject to solicit another. Her magnetism was of a different sort from Nadar’s, not attracting others from afar, but instead holding them in a powerful grip once contact was made. She gave one her absolutely full measure of attention, never looking past to see if someone more interesting or famous had walked in the room, or half-listening while keeping an ear alert to the surrounding din for hints of a more interesting or scandalous topic of discussion. Where Nadar’s best portraits often relied on a collaboration born of longstanding friendship, Katz knew her subjects in a different way, not personally but rather from deep familiarity and appreciation of their accomplishment.

If Katz’s gravitational pull was irresistible once in her orbit, it’s more of a mystery how, as a “cold caller” unaided by mutual contacts or reputation, she succeeded in convincing her subjects to agree to a portrait session in the first place. Unlike Nadar, whose single name was internationally known and whose fame as the era’s greatest portrait photographer was such that everyone aspired to sit before his camera, Katz actively avoided having a public persona as a photographer. Indeed, she never exhibited or sold any of her portrait photographs, and, apart from prints for the sitters themselves, gave away only two prints in her lifetime: one to her framer and one to her brother-in-law. Evidently, she communicated to her subjects a seriousness of purpose and a deep, genuine knowledge of and admiration for their work. To be clear, however, photography was not in any way a pretense to rub shoulders with the rich and famous, for Katz never imposed on their lives afterward nor capitalized on their celebrity. Rather, the photographs were a personal endeavor, a private affair. Perhaps it was the very fact that Katz was not a Richard Avedon or Annie Leibovitz, and that her photographs would not end up in the gossip pages or on a magazine cover, that allowed her subjects to relax and reveal something natural before her lens. Somehow, they seem to have understood that photography was Katz’s way of paying respect to the members of her personal pantheon and forging—even for the brief duration of the portrait session—a genuine connection.

In suing his brother, Adrien Tournachon, for the exclusive right to his famous moniker, Nadar explained what it meant to be a master of photographic portraiture. What could not be learned, but rather had to be an innate element of the artist’s character, Nadar wrote, “is the swift tact that puts you in communion with the model, makes you size him up, grasp his habits and ideas in accordance with his character, and allows you to render, not an indifferent plastic reproduction that could be made by the lowliest laboratory worker [by which Nadar meant Adrien!], commonplace and accidental, but the resemblance that is most familiar and most favorable, the intimate resemblance. It’s the psychological side of photography—the word doesn’t seem overly ambitious to me.”

Inspiring a degree of collaboration with her sitters, Katz seems to have grasped her subjects’ habits, ideas, and character—to have found “the intimate resemblance” in Nadar’s words. Not formulaic in either the old-fashioned practice of posing each client alongside a classical column and swag of drapery or the more modern idiom of neutral background and dramatic lighting, each of Katz’s portraits feels designed for its specific subject. Often, something emblematic of the sitter’s profession tells the viewer what it is that Katz admired: countless artists pose in their studios or stand before paintings; photographers hold their equipment or work in the darkroom; musicians pose lovingly with their instruments or examine musical scores. Not merely illustrative, however, the photographs frequently draw us in with striking compositions—the strong diagonal divisions of Katz’s portraits of Laurie Anderson, Ravi Shankar, or Paul Taylor; the compartmentalized images of John Baldessari, Robert Rauschenberg, or Jackie Winsor; the dramatic perspective of Martin Puryear’s portrait. And then there is the directness of gaze—the psychological connection between sitter and photographer—that one feels in so many of the pictures: Leo Castelli, Vladimir Feltsman, Morton Gould, Kurt Masur, Hal Prince, and Milton Resnick among others.

Thanks to a gift of 46 photographs from Katz’s longtime partner Michael S. Sachs, to the MFAH, her private pantheon is now public, whether or not she intended it to be so. What kept Katz from sharing these images during her lifetime? It seems unlikely that she worried about an unflattering critique of her photographs; by all accounts she was both confident in her own abilities and utterly immune to the judgment of others. Knowing how Katz worked, it’s possible she felt that to publish, show, or sell the photographs would be to betray the trust that had been essential to the success of each picture and to her larger project. After all, her motivation was neither fame nor fortune, but rather the personal satisfaction that came from having produced these portraits as a purely creative endeavor and as a respectful act of homage. And perhaps most important, as the intensely private person that she was, she must surely have wanted to avoid being defined by the celebrity of others. Whatever the mix of reasons behind Katz’s close guarding of her work during her lifetime, her pantheon of greats is now ours to enjoy, admire, worship, or ponder.

See all of Nancy Lee Katz’s photographs in the MFAH collection.