2025 Photo Licensing Reel

GME's Photo Licensing Reel comprises a vast array of photographs taken by Raimondo Borea (1926—1982) and Hugh Bell (1927—2012), whose collections are represented by Gartenberg Media Enterprises for licensing, exhibition, and placement.

Our Photo Licensing Reel aims to both celebrate and properly contextualize the under-seen oeuvres of these two overlooked 20th-century photographers. As fate would have it, Borea’s and Bell’s names were listed next to each other in a 1955 issue of Popular Photography magazine. Decades later, their archives have found their way to GME. The formidable bodies of work of both artists complement one another, together serving to illustrate a significant cultural and artistic period in American life.

Over a 40-year career of active photography, Raimondo Borea amassed an impressive body of work that permeated all areas of fine art photography, television, music, book publishing, and advertising. As a freelance photographer, Borea had extensive behind-the-scenes access to The Today Show, The Tonight Show, and Firing Line from the 1950s through the 1970s. During this period, he photographed such notable hosts as Johnny Carson, Jack Parr, Dave Garroway, Barbara Walters, Tom Brokaw, Jane Pauley, and William F. Buckley, Jr. He also documented the appearances of many celebrity guests, including Bette Davis, Ella Fitzgerald, Tony Bennett, Sean Connery, Sophia Loren, Farrah Fawcett, and Twiggy.

GME has licensed a number of Borea's images, including a photograph of Shari Lewis and Lambchop on The Tonight Show for the 2023 documentary Shari and Lamb Chop (Official Selection, DOC NYC) and a portrait of Dave Garroway for the cover of Jodie Peeler's 2023 book Peace: The Wide, Wide World of Dave Garroway. Borea's photograph of the acting class taught by John Houseman at the Juilliard School, featuring student Kevin Kline, was used as the frontespiece of the book Acting in the Academy: The History of Professional Actor Training in US Higher Education (2016), authored by Peter Zazzali.

Recently, a photograph of Borea's that depicts racial integration in the 1960s was licensed for Darren Newbury's Cold War Photographic Diplomacy (2024), published by Pennsylvania State University Press. GME also licensed Borea's portrait of educator Kenneth B. Clark for the fifth edition of David Sadker and Karen Zittelman's textbook Teachers, Schools and Society: A Brief Introduction to Education, published by McGraw Hill, as well as for the PBS American Experience documentary The Blinding of Isaac Woodard (2021). The Clark portrait has since been placed on permanent display at the entry to the Kenneth B. Clark Auditorium at the New York State Museum in Albany.

GME has also licensed numerous photographs by Hugh Bell. Dubbed a "poet behind the lens" in Thomas Allen Harris' 2014 documentary Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People, Bell chronicled a number of notable jazz musicians beginning in the 1950s. Arguably his most famous work is a naturally-lit, impressionistic view of jazz performers, titled Hot Jazz (1952), which was included in MoMA's Family of Man exhibit in 1955 and shown again at the Museum in the 2022 exhibit In and Around Harlem.

Bell created images that appeared on numerous album and magazine covers, including Sarah Vaughan's seminal 1955 LP After Hours. Bell's portrait of Vaughan was licensed by GME for a USPS Forever Stamp in 2021. His Vaughan portrait was also licensed — along with Bell's images of fellow jazz icons Thelonius Monk and Billie Holiday — for the forthcoming revised edition of Deborah Willis' 2000 book Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers 1840 to the Present, which was the inspiration for Harris' aforementioned documentary. A suite of four photos in which Bell captured Holiday in candid fashion backstage at Carnegie Hall were licensed for James Erskine's 2019 documentary Billie, and appeared in the Harvard University Museum's exhibition titled Art of Jazz in 2016.

Bell photographed for numerous print advertisements and magazine covers, many of which were aimed at an African-American audience. As Bell was of Afro-Caribbean descent, he also photographed extensively in the Caribbean region.

In addition to Borea and Bell's oeuvres, GME licenses images from an array of films we distribute to academic institutions. Most recently, we licensed two stills from Warren Sonbert's Amphetamine (1966) for Dr. Maurice Nagington's book The Moral Lessons of Chemsex: A Critical Approach, which was recently published by Routledge.

To view a full history of our photo licenses, click here. To learn more about the photography collections we represent, please contact GME's Fine Arts Curator, David Deitch, at david@gartenbergmedia.com.