You could truthfully say that Judy Glickman Lauder has been involved with the art of photography since she was an infant. That’s when her father, photographer Irving Bennett Ellis, began taking pictures of her that ultimately ended up becoming the classic 1960s Kodak TV commercial featuring the heart-tugging song “Turn Around,” set to a montage of images of her growing up to young womanhood.  

For years, Glickman Lauder mostly used an Instamatic camera herself, to record graduations, birthday parties and other family events. She eventually acquired a 35-millimeter camera and began taking pictures more seriously in the 1970s, making a name as she captured portraits of Holocaust survivors and the concentration camps and ghettos from that era. She also began to collect photography, leading to the gathering of works currently on display at the Sarasota Art Museum in Presence: The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder, through April 4.

That collection has grown over the decades to 700 pieces, and Glickman Lauder is making a gift of it to the Portland Museum of Art in Maine, where she lives. But in the meantime, the exhibit has also welcomed viewers in Southampton, New York, and will head to both Charleston and Miami after its time here.

“I’m thrilled to be at the Sarasota Art Museum,” says Glickman Lauder. “I love the space and the OLLI classes held there.” While she doesn’t own a home in Sarasota, she’s a frequent visitor, as her son and daughter-in-law, Rabbis Brenner and Elaine Rose Glickman, are on staff at Temple Emanu-El, and as she says, “Three of my wonderful grandchildren have grown up there.”

Glickman Lauder herself grew up in California, where being the daughter of a photographer meant “I was in the darkroom as a kid watching the images magically appear,” she says. Her father was president of the Oakland area camera club and had “a lot of friends who were photographers” including Ansel Adams. “I feel lucky to have grown up with photography,” she says.

Focused on her marriage (to attorney, philanthropist and property developer Albert Glickman, for 54 years until his death in 2013) and having a family, it wasn’t until a friend who had become the director of a memorial to Holocaust victims asked her to photograph survivors and historic sites that she began to think of herself as a professional photographer. Traveling to Warsaw, Kraków, Auschwitz and many other Holocaust-related cities and places, she honed both her technique and her awareness of the subject matter, leading next to a trip to Denmark to focus on the Danes who managed to save 90 percent of the country’s Jewish population during the Nazi occupation there. It’s a “phenomenal” story, she says, of how “the Danes really rose to their humanity as a nation and hid their Jews and put them in boats and got them to Sweden.”

Back home, Glickman Lauder also began seriously collecting works by dozens of other photographers, from Diane Arbus to Richard Avedon to Dorothea Lange to Gordon Parks. “I’ve collected the same way I take photos,” she says. “I have to be drawn to the image; it has to be something that resonates within me, that when I see the image, I go ‘Wow.’ I’m not after one particular period or artist. What I’ve collected mostly is 20th-century black and white film, what I grew up with and knew and loved. The human spirit is what relates the exhibit images together. Each one tells a story. I’m very interested in the civil rights period, in humor. There’s celebrity here, rock ‘n’ roll, quirkiness, seriousness. There’s something there people have really been responding to.”

Even as the collection has mounted into the hundreds, she continues on the hunt. “I go to auctions and galleries, to schools, to see emerging artists,” she says. “I’m always looking. I’m just thrilled with photography as an art form. My late [second] husband [Leonard Lauder, son of cosmetics titan Estée Lauder and a major art collector himself] always said a piece would have to really hit him, and I think that applies to me. They say every photograph that one takes is a self-portrait in some way, and I think collecting is like that, too—my collection tells me about different facets of me.”

For more information on Presence: The Photography Collection of Judy Glickman Lauder, visit sarasotaartmuseum.org.