For more than two decades, Nancy Lee Katz photographed some of the most important cultural figures of her time. Then she showed the results to no one—not even her partner of 35 years.
That startling detail was what guests were still discussing after an intimate preview of Nancy Lee Katz: A Private Pantheon on September 1 at the Magnes Collection of Jewish Art and Life at UC Berkeley, ahead of the exhibition’s public opening the following day. The evening centered on a conversation moderated by the Magnes’s senior curator, Alissa Schapiro, between collector Michael S. Sachs, Katz’s longtime partner, and guest curator Lauren Graves, who walked the museum’s VIP members through the making of the show.
Between 1986 and 2010, Katz photographed the artists, writers, musicians and thinkers she admired—from Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg to Roy Lichtenstein to Maya Lin—capturing 133 portraits she never exhibited, sold or published. Sachs, whose gift of the complete Pantheon made the exhibition possible, offered a rare window into her process: she worked alone with each subject, camera and sitter only, refusing even him a place in the room…