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Tuesday, June 5, 2012

Vision To Visuals: Full Circle

Serendipity brought William John Kennedy’s 50-year-old images back to Duggal

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It was KIWI Arts Group who connected with Duggal's General Manager Bob Kapoor to start work on printing these images for the first time for an exhibition titled "Before They Were Famous: Behind the Lens of William John Kennedy." The incredible serendipity of this project brought William and his wife, Marie, to meet me at Duggal and print the rolls, which were originally processed here 50 years ago for their first ever exhibition in history, bringing the work full circle. A review of the exhibition mentions: "The negatives were processed at Duggal—a printer in New York City, which is still there—at the time the film was shot. Mr. Huter contacted Duggal upon finding out about the negatives and said, 'How would you like to print the work that you processed in 1963 and 1964,' and Baldev Duggal, still being there, excitedly said, 'Oh my God, this is crazy!'"


It's crazy indeed for me that we would work on the same project nearly five decades later. In addition to the great excitement of working on this rare project, I feel a deep pride for having built a company that has stayed connected with its original love and commitment to photography by maintaining a full traditional photography printing photo lab while expanding into a 250-plus-employee visual solutions company. We've printed all of the black-and-white images from the Kennedy archive directly from the original negatives as silver-gelatin prints. This collection of photographs, now part of a museum-style, curated exhibition, has traveled to select cities over the past 14 months; the New York City premiere marks the reali-zation of a lifelong dream for the 82-year-old Kennedy and an important milestone for this exhibition.

Warhol famously said that, in the future, everyone would be famous for 15 minutes. With these exceptional photographs of Warhol and Indiana, which are works of art in themselves, Kennedy has gone beyond his 15 minutes and secured permanent fame in the chronicles of art history for providing us a completely new perspective on two American artists with whom we grew up and still admire today.

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