AIPAD Welcomes New President Michael Lee

As we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel that was this difficult year, AIPAD members welcome a new president and reflect on the creative measures that kept them engaged with artists and collectors during the pandemic.

Michael Lee, director of Lee Gallery in Winchester, MA, is taking over as president from Richard Moore. Lee’s father, Mack Lee, became a photography dealer the year Michael was born—Michael remembers “collections of salt prints and stacks of large, mounted photographs taking over the living room” when he was a child—and he has been involved with the gallery operations since he graduated from Colby College. Although he majored in economics and math, he quickly immersed himself in the history of photography and the business of sales and was soon bringing stacks of photographs to museum curators. “I remember showing the most beautiful Talbot Bridge of Sighs print I’d ever seen to a curator, and their enthusiastic reaction really had an impact on me,” he recalls. He was hooked, and he’s taken on the role of AIPAD president, he says, partly to pay a debt to the photography world, and to the colleagues and photographers “who have given me and my family so much over the years.” Lee describes AIPAD as an organization that is flexible and adapting. “The photography market is constantly evolving,” he says. “When the AIPAD Photography Show moved to the piers, we joined the larger art world—in the same way that photography has become central to all art practice. The way artists use photography has changed, and the way people see photography has changed.”