You could truthfully say that Judy Glickman Lauder has been involved with the art of photography since she was an infant. That’s when her father, photographer Irving Bennett Ellis, began taking pictures of her that ultimately ended up becoming the classic 1960s Kodak TV commercial featuring the heart-tugging song “Turn Around,” set to a montage of images of her growing up to young womanhood.
For years, Glickman Lauder mostly used an Instamatic camera herself, to record graduations, birthday parties and other family events. She eventually acquired a 35-millimeter camera and began taking pictures more seriously in the 1970s, making a name as she captured portraits of Holocaust survivors and the concentration camps and ghettos from that era. She also began to collect photography, leading to the gathering of works currently on display at the Sarasota Art Museum in Presence: The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder, through April 4.
That collection has grown over the decades to 700 pieces, and Glickman Lauder is making a gift of it to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, where she lives. But in the meantime, the exhibit has also welcomed viewers in Southampton, New York, and will head to both Charleston and Miami after its time here.
“I’m thrilled to be at the Sarasota Art Museum,” says Glickman Lauder. “I love the space and the OLLI classes held there.” While she doesn’t own a home in Sarasota, she’s a frequent visitor, as her son and daughter-in-law, Rabbis Brenner and Elaine Rose Glickman, are on staff at Temple Emanu-El, and as she says, “Three of my wonderful grandchildren have grown up there.”
Glickman Lauder herself grew up in California, where being the daughter of a photographer meant “I was in the darkroom as a kid watching the images magically appear,” she says. Her father was president of the Oakland area camera club and had “a lot of friends who were photographers” including Ansel Adams. “I feel lucky to have grown up with photography,” she says…