Before the show, the designers, Max Osterweis and Erin Beatty, spoke about how they wanted to avoid the kitsch box of prints, their mainstay.
In 1983, I walked into his office fantasizing about walking in the footsteps of Margaret Bourke-White when the only thing I had to offer was a black box of prints of a man beating his wife.
"In our world, we play these jokes on each other—'Hello, this is Anna Wintour calling.' " Steidl visited Leutwyler in his apartment, and looked over a box of prints connected to a magazine assignment in 2009: shots of personal items belonging to Michael Jackson, which had been crated up when the singer, in dire financial straits, planned to auction off his memorabilia.
The campaigning "isn't cheap," he explained, with a box of printed leaflets advertising the benefits of Sharia law costing 40 pounds ($58), which he and other members of the Shariah Project collected between themselves.
So, while photographers like Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans and Russell Lee crisscrossed the country, Mr. Stryker was sending boxes of prints to Romana Javitz, the director of the New York Public Library Picture Collection, to make sure there was a repository other than the National Archives.
I met her at the time, visited the exhibition with her (she was a sturdy 83), and spent part of a day in her small apartment on the Rue Lalande in the 14th arrondissement, with rainy Paris light hovering over a living room piled high with large white boxes of printing paper.
Since his death, last fall, the apartment has become Leiter's de facto archive; Margit Erb, his gallery representative, and Anders Goldfarb, his long-time assistant, have spent months organizing the boxes of prints, negatives, portfolios, and books that he left haphazardly piled throughout the space.
When my friends and I protested against the Vietnam War forty years ago, we lugged boxes of printed filers on the subway back to Brooklyn from print shops on the west side of Manhattan.
They have a great "box set" of prints available that feature archival quality print and come in a nice storage box.
Much to the chagrin of collectors, Tim's archive consists of box after box of unsigned prints.
