This issue of DART is a reprise of a story I did last year in appreciation of Steve Baron, the longtime Production Director at Aperture Foundation. I was to have had lunch with Steve, his wife Caryl, and several other Aperture expats today. I learned a few minutes in advance, however, that Steve had passed away earlier in the day. Information about the memorial service on Thursday follows.

Stevan A. Baron, Steve to those of us lucky enough to work with him at Aperture, served as production director there for 40 years before retiring in 2003. I had the pleasure of spending an evening recently with Steve, his wife Caryl, and former marketing director Lois Myller over a feast made by our mutual colleague, book designer Wendy Byrne. The evening was filled with anecdotes of all kinds from honorific to horrific and a good time was had. I was filled with admiration for Steve's humanity, his commitment to the art of the book, and his disdain for the commonplace.

A few days later, I read a piece Steve wrote regarding William Eggleston on Aperture's blog, EXPOSURES. The tone of the story is so exact it seemed that I was sitting opposite him at Aperture's former offices in a brownstone on 23^rd Street, under the giant Macbeth light in the 2^nd floor library/conference room/intern workspace/kitchen/with adjoining executive offices to review prints for one of my books. This was before digital pre-press and the place was so underwhelming to visitors that it prompted one notable photographer to say, in disbelief, "So this is the nerve center?"

Steve always exerted the right mix of disdain and delight that seemed necessary to end up with a gorgeously printed book. At the time, say between 1990 and 1999, just about everything was printed in Italy, and most books were supervised on press by Steve. So when he would say, "Can't you get better prints?" - spoken through a beatific smile that nearly masked a touch of scorn - the race was on. At one point I took a course at the International Center for Photography on documentary photography, which required plenty of darkroom time - just to build the confidence I needed to demand "better prints" from photographers and their agents.

Left: Grand Canal, Suzhou, 1986-1995, copyright Robert Glenn Ketchum. Right: No. 5 from the "Parents" series, 1998, copyright Wang Jinsong. Photographs courtesy of Asia Society. Both from China: Fifty Years Inside the People's Republic, copyright Aperture Foundation.

On a project that might endure - and test one's endurance for months at a time - there was also plenty of laughter. During the production of China: Fifty Years Inside the People's Republic, for which I brought in work by numerous previously unknown Chinese photographers, the day the first proofs arrived finally came - at this stage, from a printer in China. One of the portfolios being proofed was a series by Robert Glenn Ketchum of the Grand Canal, which is incredibly polluted. Shot in color under rainy skies, the look and feel of these photographs is environmental misery. The printers, however, made amazing "improvements" that endowed the gloomy scenes with something that actually bordered on sunshine. We couldn't figure out how they did it - and it took some creative writing to come up with polite and respectful instructions about recovering the original dismal tone.

Following is the intro to Steve's story about William Eggleston's prints and his influence on the art of photography.

"In my 40 years there, Aperture never made a book of [William Eggleston's] photos. We only got as far as including some then-new work, quite different from what I knew, in Aperture magazine. In the early 80s, Aperture's long-time senior editor, Carole Kismaric, disappeared from the office for a couple of days. On her first day back, she stopped by my desk and dropped a half dozen 4 x 5 inch prints in front of me, and remained silent.

"I'd seen Eggleston's book, William Eggleston's Guide (1976) from MoMA once or twice, but never his prints. So my first question to Carole was, "Am I supposed to reproduce from these?" thinking that they were for the magazine and I'd be expected to perform a little quality magic that Walgreens had missed. And my second thought was, "Can't you get better prints?" which she had heard from me a hundred times before. I still wasn't registering that they were the work of one of our premier living photographers and that obtaining his photos in a day or two was something special. Then, following a lightning bolt of understanding, I was thrilled and said, "Oh, these are Eggleston's, aren't they? How was your trip?" I was, of course, pleased and excited that she had returned with his prints, regardless of their drugstore quality."

A memorial service will be held in Steve's honor on Thursday 1:30 PM to 3 PM at the Plaza Jewish Community Center. The Plaza Jewish Community Center is located at 630 Amsterdam Avenue on the south west corner of Amsterdam and 91st. We plan to hold a reception afterwards at a place yet to be determined.

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