David W. Dunlap/The New York Times Mr. Dee, right, on Tuesday.D. James Dee retired this spring after 39 years in business as the SoHo Photographer, with a high reputation for documenting artwork and gallery installations, great stories about the New York art scene in the late 20th century and more than 250,000 color transparencies and black-and-white negatives for which he no longer had any use.
He and his wife, Sarala, are moving to Miami from their home and studio at 12 Wooster Street. The vans will arrive Monday. And Mr. Dee made it plain, in an article published June 4 in The New York Times, that his photo archive was not coming along, even though it amounted to an astonishingly broad and professional visual record of New York artists and galleries, beginning in the mid-1970s with the sculptor George Segal.
The only hitch â€" and it is not inconsiderable â€" is that almost none of Mr. Dee’s images are labeled. The transparencies were extra exposures he made at the time of shooting, as a kind of insurance. The negatives were used to produce prints for clients. After the jobs were done, he tossed the film in a box. At the end, there were more than 65 boxes, far too many to take into retirement and a second career as an artist in his own right.
If no one claimed the collection, Mr. Dee lamented, it was bound for a Dumpster.
Those who did step forward in the weeks after the article appeared included the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and the George Eastman House International Museum of Photography and Film in Rochester, N.Y. For one reason or another, however, nothing quite fit. Moving day was approaching quickly.
Then came Ian McDermott, the collection development manager of ARTstor, a subscription-only digital archive that serves some 1,500 universities, colleges, libraries and museums worldwide. Not only would this be the ideal audience for Mr. Dee’s images, ARTstor subscribers would almost certainly be able to identify most â€" if not all â€" of the artworks and installations for which no captions now exist.
A deal was born. Mr. Dee gave his archive to ARTstor, with the hope of receiving a tax deduction. ARTstor will pay him to serve as a consultant as it begins digitizing the images and trying to catalog them.
“There’s a little more dot-connecting to do,†Mr. McDermott said Tuesday, as a van pulled up at 12 Wooster Street to take the boxes away. (ARTstor is based in Manhattan, making the logistics a bit easier.)
Mr. Dee demurred. “There’s a lot more dot-connecting to do,†he said, relieved that his archive had found a good home and that he would now have one less thing to do before leaving New York.
