Katharine Martinez, the director of the University of Arizona Center for Creative Photography, is retiring, effective Saturday, Jan. 30.
Martinez, who was unavailable for comment, had been the director of the Fine Arts Library at Harvard College Library in Cambridge, Massachusetts, before coming to the CCP in 2010. She was the center’s fifth director, including two interims, in seven years.
The UA’s Senior Vice President for Research, Kimberly Andrews Espy, said in an email to university staff that a national search for Martinez’s replacement will be conducted later this year. The UA’s museums are under the auspices of Espy’s office; she was out of town and unavailable for comment.
Martinez’s tenure at the internationally known center started out on a rocky note. Shortly after she arrived, she dismissed the CCP’s board, made up of people from around the country with expertise in photography and fundraising.
“I knew a number of the people on that board,” said Terry Etherton, owner of Etherton Gallery and a recognized expert on fine art photography.
“I understand when you are new and you want to bring in your own people, but the way she did it alienated people. They got a form letter saying basically we need people on the board that can come up with more money. ... What it created was people who had ill feelings toward the center.”
The CCP has been without a board since, though it formed an advisory group in October it calls a “visiting committee;” Etherton is among those in that group.
Etherton said he thinks Martinez’s single greatest accomplishment was hiring the well-respected Joshua Chuang as head curator, a position that had been vacant for five years. Chuang resigned this month after two years in the role.
“The center was having exciting, relevant shows with a young curator who really knew his stuff,” said Etherton. “That was lost when he left.”
Etherton moved to Tucson more than three decades ago because of the center, and has a deep affection for it. But, he said, “Its reputation has gotten dicey.”
Espy named Rebecca “Becky” Senf the new chief curator this week. Senf has been with the CCP since 2006, working primarily on the CCP gallery at the Phoenix Museum of Art. She will continue in that role as well. Etherton said he has great respect for the work Senf does and that it is a promotion she deserves.
Under Martinez’s tutelage, the CCP has increased its fine arts prints holdings by about 5,000, said Chris Sigurdson, spokesman for the university. That kind of stream of holdings isn’t unusual; since its inception, the center has steadily received gifts of prints from photographers and collectors.
The archive holdings, the meat of the CCP’s collection, have increased by about 10 since Martinez joined the staff, said Sigurdson.
But there have been no new archival acquisitions of the caliber that launched the center. Those archives for such towering 20th century photographers as Ansel Adams (who co-founded the center in 1974 with then-UA president John Schaefer), Edward Weston, Louise Dahl-Wolfe, and Frederick Sommer were key to the center’s international reputation.
Until a new head is found, Sigurdson said the day-to-day operations of the center will be run by a senior management team made up Senf, photograph conservator Jae Gutierrez, archivist Leslie Squyres and Denise Gose, the center’s associate director. W. James Burns, director of the UA Museum of Art, will be the acting administrative director.
