Travis has been at the AIC since 1972 when he was appointed Assistant Curator in the Department of Prints and Drawings, becoming full Curator in 1975 when the Department of Photography was founded. At a time when there was little popular interest in photography as an art form Travis began building what is today an extraordinary collection of over 18,000 photographs, covering the entire history of the medium. He has curated some 150 exhibitions during his time there, including seminal exhibtions on the works of Walker Evans, Andre Kertesz, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, and Brassai.  

      Before moving to Chicago some ten years ago, the photography galleries of the Art Institute were always a requisite stop whenever I visited this city. It was there that I came to know the works of several Chicago photographers, including Thomas Arndt and Jin Lee, two very different kinds of photographers whose works graced the walls there, that I first encountered in the AIC Photography Department galleries. I have since learned just how important Travis has been in supporting and encouraging a host of Chicago photographers over the past thirty-six years, making what was for many of them their first museum acquisition, and providing the first showing of their work in a museum context. 

      I have been fortunate to have my own work both collected by the Art Institute and shown by Travis (and his cohorts Kate Bussard and Liz Siegel) in a number of different exhibitions there, most recently in "Photographs by the Score: Personal Visions Twenty-some Years Apart," an exhibition that Travis curated in 2006 in which he selected an early work (or two) by various photographers in the collection and then paired these pictures with photographs made by the same photographer some twenty years later. What Travis was hoping to identify (for himself and the viewer) were the ways in which a photographer's thinking changed over that period, and how that might be discerned between the various works over two decades. By then I had had numerous conversations with David, and knew him to be a particularly brilliant and astute scholar, connoisseur, and enthusiast where photographs were concerned (not to mention his deep passion for sailing and now cycling). But his selection of my work for the show proved to be disarmingly canny. Bringing together a large scale multiple image Polaroid piece from 1997 of a young woman with two small black and white pictures made in Harlem twenty-one years earlier, he had discerned in his selection of the two early pictures the conceptual basis of my early, recent, and current work. That he selected the two photographs that were both my earliest and lasting breakthroughs, without any conversation with me, gave me a real sense of the deep observational qualities he brought to his work as curator. David was characteristically modest when I pointed this out during my brief remarks at the opening event.

      I first met David at a dinner held in my honor at Madison's restaurant following the opening of an exhibition of mine at Rhona Hoffman Gallery some fifteen or so years ago. As is his custom, he had his own camera (an early digital model) with him, and was happily snapping away at the dinner guests at his table throughout the evening. We didn't talk much that night. I suspect he thought I was just a hotshot New York photographer/artist blowing through his town for one glamorous evening. He was happy to oblige, but no real connection was made. When I moved to Chicago in 1998, I made it a point to get to know David better. As an artist of a certain age, who got my first camera in the late 1960s, I am aware that my sense of the history is a bit longer than a lot of the younger curators I've come to know. I knew that David knew that history intimately and more deeply that I did, and I wanted to have some conversations with him about it. It was no surprise to find that he is one of the most erudite and knowledgeable people I have met when it comes to the photographic image. His book At the Edge of the Light: Thoughts on Photography and Photographers, on Talent and Genius remains one of my favorite small books to travel with. If you don't own one you should. Travis clearly loves the process of writing about pictures as much as he enjoys looking at and thinking about them. 

      David was gracious enough to make himself available to my Graduate Seminar students on several occassions, meeting with them in the Photography Department's Study Room, and holding forth on various photographs that he had selected to look at and talk to them about. It was always a remarkable thing to see his degree of animation and enthusiasm as he talked about these pictures, which he clearly knew well, but about which he also seemed to discover things  as he spoke and looked at them. It was his love and enthusiasm for photographs that I wanted to expose my students to, hoping that they would find it as inspiring and refreshing as I did, and that it would give them something to aspire to. I can only hope that they realized what a rare and special occasion that was.

      I have to say, too, that David Travis is a true gentleman. Since I'm a parent, I suppose you could say his parents raised him well. David has often been a dinner guest after the Lectures in Photography program that I coordinate at Columbia College Chicago; he has a standing invitation. No matter how many times he has graced the table, I always get a thoughtful handwritten thank you note from him shortly after. It is always in the form of card containing one of his own well made photographs, sometimes a picture he actually made at the dinner, other times not. Always the pictures display a keen sense of form and observation. Others have told me they too have a small collection of these wonderful David Travis photographic cards too. They are noteworthy for both the interesting photographs on them and for what they say about the gracious and generous man who sent them.