Through her husband she met and became friends with a wide circle of important photographers that included Ansel Adams, Wynn Bullock and Imogen Cunningham.
Needing a job to support herself, she made the then risky decision to open a gallery that would sell only photography.
She asked Adams to provide her with some of his prints to launch her collection, and he both honored her request and helped her find a gallery space in the nearby small town of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California.
She mortgaged her house to come up with money to help finance the project,[5] but as a result she added a large number of Adams' prints to her collection.
She was an early collector of Jerry Uelsmann, Ralph Gibson, Michael Kenna, Joel-Peter Witkin and Adam Fuss, and she helped build their reputations by placing their work in important corporate collections like the Gilman Paper Company, Pacific Bell, Mitsubishi, and the Southland Corporation.
2 (1920s) - $348,000, Edward Weston's The White Iris (1921 ) - $340,000, and Paul Strand's Boat Houses, Wolf River, Gaspe Quebec (1936) - $336,000.