Philip Gefter is an American author and photography critic. He wrote the biography of Sam Wagstaff, Wagstaff: Before and After Mapplethorpe, for which he received the 2014 Marfield Prize, the national award for arts writing. He is also the author of George Dureau: The Photographs, and Photography After Frank, a book of essays published by Aperture in 2009. He was on staff at The New York Times for over fifteen years, where he wrote regularly about photography. He produced the 2011 documentary film, Bill CunninghamNew York.
Life
Gefter received a fine arts degree from the Pratt Institute in painting and photography. Upon graduation, he took a job as a picture researcher in the Time-Life Picture Collection, which exposed him to the photographs of Walker Evans, Margaret Bourke-White, Robert Capa, W. Eugene Smith, and Alfred Eisenstaedt, among other photographers. Following that, he took a job at Aperture Foundation, where, as assistant editor, he worked on the Aperture History of Photography series and on publications such as Edward Weston: Nudes; America and Lewis Hine; and the re-publication of Robert Frank's The Americans. In 1982, Henry Geldzahler, then commissioner of cultural affairs for the city of New York, appointed him photography advisor to the Department of Cultural Affairs, where he put together a program of public exhibitions. In 2011, he and Richard Press released their feature-length documentary film Bill Cunningham New York, about The New York Times photographer Bill Cunningham. The film received nominations for Best Documentary from The Directors' Guild of America; the Producers Guild of America; and the Independent Spirit Awards. In 2013, it was acquired by the Film Department of the Museum of Modern Art for its permanent collection. In 2011, Gefter received a Museum Scholar residency at the Getty Research Institute, the Getty Center, in Los Angeles, to work on a biography of Sam Wagstaff, the curator, collector, and patron of Robert Mapplethorpe, for the publisher W. W. Norton/Liveright, a project he began in 2009. In 2002, he and Press commissioned the architect, Michael Bell, to build a house for them in New York State'sHudson Valley. The Gefter-Press House, completed in 2007, is included in the book, American Masterworks: Houses of the Twentieth and Twenty First Centuries, by the architectural historian, Kenneth Frampton. In 2007, Gefter became a founding editorial advisor to Dear Dave magazine.
