Obama will return to Occidental College -- via photo exhibit

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Having done a bonanza business during a three-month engagement at M+B Gallery in West Hollywood, the photography exhibition ‘Barack Obama: The Freshman’ will mark a presidential homecoming of sorts with its move next month to the campus where ‘Barry,’ as he was then known, spent his first two years of college.

Sixteen of the black-and-white images that photography student Lisa Jack took of Obama when he was a 19-year-old freshman at Occidental College will be on display Oct. 12 to Nov. 6 in the campus’ Coons Administration Center. The pictures of the president-as-callow-youth, deploying a cigarette and a Panama hat for that likable-but-cool effect, were taken in the living room of the little apartment Jack rented a stone’s throw from the Eagle Rock campus. Now the pictures will take up residence in a prominent spot, the foyer of the college president’s office, as part of the pomp and circumstance surrounding the Oct. 24 inauguration of Jonathan Veitch as Oxy’s new president.

Shannon Richardson, the M+B Gallery’s director, said plans are in the works for the show to move on to a gallery in Paris after the photos are displayed at Occidental. M+B sold more than 300 limited edition prints of the future president -- priced from $1,000 to $4,500 -- during the gallery show that ended Aug. 29, she said.

As photography shows at commercial galleries go, that qualifies as ‘extraordinary,’ says Stephen White, a curator, collector, dealer and historian of art photography. While running his own L.A. photography gallery from 1975 to 1991, White said, he was delighted when a show resulted in 10 or 15 sales. White suspects that Obama-mania, rather than connoisseurship of the photographic art, drove most of those sales during what he says has been a down market for art photography. ‘It was a very smart show to do, let’s put it that way.’

‘I had one guy who flew in from Florida after seeing it on the ‘Today’ show,’ Richardson said. ‘He bought a big one.’

-- Mike Boehm

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