Gay Block Collection

FULL FINDING AID AND LIST OF MATERIALS

Read the finding aid for the Gay Block Collection processed between 2020-2024.

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BIOGRAPHY

Gay Block was born in 1942 in Houston, Texas. Gay Block has been a celebrated photographer for decades. Her work has been published, collected, and featured by fine arts institutions across the US and the world including MoMA New York, San Francisco MoMA, and The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.

Gay Block started her career as a portrait photographer in 1973 when she began capturing portraits of members of her own affluent Jewish community in Houston and later expanded her study to include South Miami Beach, interviewing and photographing South Miami Beach’s elders from 1982-1985. In 1981, Gay Block began capturing the summer campers of Camp Pinecliffe in Main. In 2006, Gay Block re-photographed and interviewed these subjects in a video series titled “Camp Girls.” Gay Block’s landmark collaboration with writer Malka Drucker, RESCUERS: Portraits of Moral Courage in the Holocaust, both a book and a traveling exhibit, has been shown at over fifty venues in the US and abroad, including the Museum of Modern Art, NY, in 1992. In 2003 Gay Block’s portrait of her Mother in photographs, video, and words, Bertha Alyce: Mother ExPosed, was published by UNM Press and traveled as an exhibit. Radius Books published About Love: Gay Block Photographs, 1975-2010, a career survey of portraits, in 2011.  Gay Block lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico.