afterword

Jan Kesner was raised in Chicago, where her mother first opened the visual arts to her.

By eight, Jan knew that her life would be in art. By twelve, she had shot her first roll of film on a Kodak Instamatic, and had come to admire Edward Weston. Her Kodak exposures were not family snapshots, though. Instead, she captured abstract views of the sky, and the bare branches of trees reaching into the horizon. By thirteen, she was printing in her first darkroom.

Jan went on to study at the Art Institute of Chicago, which held one of the great collections of vintage photography in the world. David Travis, photographic historian and curator for the Art Institute, became a mentor to Jan, with the work of Imogen Cunningham serving as critical inspiration on her journey.

A perfectionist, Jan doubted that she could reach the technical mastery that she had come to recognize and respect in the photographers that she had studied so closely. Instead, she turned her practice towards filmmaking, while still taking every course in photographic history and theory the school offered.

Although her heart remained in still photography, her studies and focus increasingly turned towards experimental film, and she moved to Los Angeles to work in the film industry after the Art Institute.

As a film editor, she met the collector and critic Manfred Heiting, who introduced her to G. Ray Hawkins. Hawkins had become the first photography dealer in Los Angeles, establishing the first gallery in the city to recognize the medium as fine art.

Impressed by her knowledge of photographic history, Hawkins offered her a role at his gallery. Jan accepted it as a steadier living than film, without yet knowing she had found the path that would end up defining her career.

After four years with the G. Ray Hawkins Gallery, Jan left in 1985 to begin showing work from her own small apartment in Carthay Circle.

Her clientele and her stable of artists grew quickly.

Among the first photographers that she represented were Richard Misrach, Robert Frank, Walker Evans, O. Winston Link, and the estate of Max Yavno. And, her timing opened access to historically important photographic works that is simply no longer possible today — prints by Edward Weston that once sold for a couple thousand dollars have since come to command more than a hundred times that.

In 1987, she opened the Jan Kesner Gallery on North La Brea Avenue, only the second gallery in Los Angeles devoted to fine art photography.

Alongside masterworks, Jan championed contemporary photography with conceptual and abstract themes and singular viewpoints, often exhibiting work that challenged perspectives, that experimented with or embraced the medium in ways distinct from traditional photography, and that captured constructs or stories that reinforced, juxtaposed, or blurred the editorial and pictorial.

In only its sophomore year, in 1989, the Gallery answered the burgeoning climate of government censorship with Selected Sin, a group exhibition of work by Ruth Bernhard, Imogen Cunningham, Robert Mapplethorpe, Jan Saudek, Andres Serrano, and Edward Weston. The following year, Vintage Photographs from the 1950s presented the work of Bruce Bellas, known as Bruce of Los Angeles, making the Gallery one of the first in the country to show male physique photography as an art form in its own right.

Those were but two early moments when the Gallery expressed a profound opinion, solely through the art that Jan chose to hang on the walls of her space.

For more than two decades, the Gallery presented a long sequence of provocative and captivating exhibitions, among them five shows tracing the development of John Humble, whose stunning photographs of Los Angeles came to the J. Paul Getty Museum in 2007.

Today, Jan works privately with collectors, consulting on the acquisition, presentation, and care of fine art photography.