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• Issue #278
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By Michael Diemar

The conversations I have had with dealers in vintage photography over the years have at some point inevitably led me to ask the question, "So what do you collect yourself?". And the standard answer has usually been a variation of "I don't want to compete with my clients" and so they collect something else entirely. And sometimes that something else is something very specific, be it images of gambling or skiing. For most, their collections remain private passions, shared only with friends and colleagues. Only rarely are the collections shared in books, a shame, as I have never seen a dealer collection that was less than fascinating.

Eugène Atget, Hôtel de la Villeflex, 71 rue des Archives, 1907, Albumen Print.

I'm glad that Barry Singer has shared his collection in the newly published book PAPER PRINTERS PRINTING – Photographs from the Collection of Barry Singer. Barry Singer is a highly respected photography dealer and gallerist, based in El Cerrito, CA. In the foreword, he describes the two momentous events that occurred in 1957, one being the Soviets launching Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, the second being him purchasing a Box Brownie Hawkeye 620 with his bar mitzvah money. Later on, having failed to find a teaching position after receiving a MFA from the California Institute of Arts, Singer needed to find a trade and so he enrolled in a trade school, using his graphic arts knowledge to learn offset printing. In 1976, he started his own offset lithography printing company, specializing in duotone photographic reproduction, soon attracting work from museums and galleries.

And then he himself became a collector of photographs, which gradually led to him becoming a private dealer, then a gallerist. And he decided to focus his collection on the trade and craft he had been involved in for close to three decades. Before I read Robert Flynn Johnson's illuminating essay, taking in Johannes Gutenberg, private collecting and individual works in the book, I went through the images in the book, and was transported back in time, to a school trip in my pre-teens, to the local newspaper, the noise of the machines, the boxes of lead type and the enormous rolls of paper.

Lewis W Hine, (A Part-time Office and Delivery Boy on cobblestone road in front of Burnet House building) , circa 1920's ,Vintage Gelatin Silver Print.

With a great eye, Singer has put together an extraordinary collection, where anonymous photographers are mixed with recognized masters. The very first image is by Atget, one I hadn't seen before; Hôtel de Villeflex, 1907, of an etching press with stacked paper. There's a wonderful ambrotype, by an unknown photographer, of a small printing press, casually placed on a chair. Man Ray appears with an image from the darkly erotic, comically murderous and politically incorrect series of Méret Oppenheim being put through a printing press by Louis Marcoussis. While showing a wide range of different aspects of the trades, "newsies", paper-making, the shop front of a main street printer, there are constant surprises, be it Beaumont Newhall's image of Charis Weston's typewriter, with a sheet of the typed manuscript for Edward Weston's book California and the West. The images are interspersed with some great quotes, such as "Before printing was discovered, a century was equal to a thousand years" (Henry David Thoreau) and "If all printers were determined not to print anything till they were sure it would offend nobody, there would be very little printed (Benjamin Franklin). True then as it is now. As a final thought, Singer's book makes me wish more dealers would share their collections in book form.

To contact Barry Singer to purchase a copy, you can email him at: barry@singergallery.com. The price is $60, plus shipping.

Michael Diemar is editor-in-chief of The Classic, a print and digital magazine about classic photography. In August 2025, he cofounded Vintage Photo Fairs Europe, an organization focused on promoting independent tabletop fairs in Europe and spreading knowledge about classic photography in general. He is a long-time writer about the photography scene, writing extensively for several Scandinavian photography publications, as well as for the E-Photo Newsletter and I Photo Central.